personal favour, and built her a temple. But the first Roman to become a god, as part of aiming at monarchy, was Julius Caesar. Divus Julius Caesar could claim personal ties to the gods, both by descent and by office. He was from the gens Julia, whose members contended to be descended from Aeneas and his mother Venus. In his eulogy for his aunt Julia, Caesar also indirectly claimed to be descended from Ancus Marcius and the kings of Rome, and so from Mars. Moreover, when he was a teenager, Marius had named him flamen Dialis, the special priest of Jupiter. Sulla had cancelled this appointment; however, relatively early in his career, Caesar had become pontifex maximus, the chief priest of Rome, who fulfilled most of the religious duties of the ancient kings. He had spent his twenties in the divine monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean, and was intimately familiar with Bithynia. Caesar made use of these connections in his rise to power, but not more than his rivals would have, or more than his other advantages. When he spoke at the funeral of his aunt Julia in 69 BC, Julius Caesar spoke of her descent from the Roman kings, and implied his own; but he also reminded his audience she had been Marius' wife, and (by implication) that he was one of the few surviving Marians. When, however, he defeated his rivals in 45 BC and assumed full personal control of the Roman state, he asserted more. During the Roman Civil War, since 49 BC, he had returned to the Eastern Mediterranean, where he had been called god and savior, and been familiar with the Ptolemaic Egyptian monarchy of Cleopatra, called Cleopatra Thea because of the weight she placed on her own divinity. Also, he had a new Senate to deal with. Most of the more resolute defenders of the Senate had joined with Pompey, and – one way or another – they were not sitting in the Senate. Caesar had replaced them with his own partisans, few of whom were committed to the old Roman methods; some of them were not even from Italy. It was rumoured that Caesar intended a despotic removal of power and wealth from Rome eastwards, perhaps to Alexandria or Ilium (Troy). During the Civil War, he had declared Venus his patron goddess: he vowed to erect a temple for Venus Victrix if she