by the spiritual supremacy and political influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In the Eastern Empire, sworn adherence to Christian orthodoxy became a prerequisite of Imperial accession – Anastasius I signed a document attesting his obedience to orthodox doctrine and practice. He is the last emperor known to be consecrated as divus on his death (AD 518). The title appears to have been abandoned on grounds of its spiritual impropriety but the consecration of Eastern emperors continued: they held power through divine ordinance and their rule was the manifestation of sacred power on earth. The adventus and the veneration of the Imperial image continued to provide analogies for devotional representations (Icons) of the heavenly hierarchy and the rituals of the Orthodox Church. Historical evaluations The Roman imperial cult is sometimes considered a deviation from Rome's traditional Republican values, a religiously insincere cult of personality which served Imperial propaganda. It drew its power and effect, however, from both religious traditions deeply engrained in Roman culture, such as the veneration of the genius of each individual and of the ancestral dead, and on forms of the Hellenistic ruler cult developed in the eastern provinces of the Empire. The nature and function of imperial cult remain contentious, not least because its Roman historians employed it equally as a topos for Imperial worth and Imperial hubris. It has been interpreted as an essentially foreign, Graeco-Eastern institution, imposed cautiously and with some difficulty upon a Latin-Western Roman culture in which the deification of rulers was constitutionally alien, if not obnoxious. In this viewpoint, the essentially servile and "un-Roman" imperial cult was established at the expense of the traditional Roman ethics which had sustained the Republic. For Christians and secularists alike, the identification of mortal emperors with godhead represented the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of paganism which led to the triumph of Christianity as Rome's state religion. Very few modern historians would now support this point of view. Some – among them Beard et al. – find no distinct category of imperial cult within the religio-political life of Empire: the Romans themselves used no such enveloping term. Cult to living or dead emperors was inseparable from Imperial state religion, which was inextricably interwoven with Roman identity and whose beliefs and practices were founded within the ancient commonality of Rome's social and domestic mos maiorum. Descriptions of cult to emperors as a tool of "Imperial propaganda" or