Carpocrates, Epiphanes, and Marcellina

At the age of seventeen, Epiphanes, son of Carpocrates, died of unknown causes. He had made so great an impact on his parents that they literally deified him. The practice of posthumous deification was, at the time (the early second century CE), a
practice of aristocratic families with heirs who perished in the flower of their youth. To mention only two famous examples, the Roman orator Cicero sought to deify his daughter Tullia by building her a grand shrine or temple (fanum). Cicero was in
part motivated because he considered his daughter to be “the best and most learned of all women.” Antinous, mentioned in Chapter 1, was the teenage favorite of the emperor Hadrian. When Antinous drowned in the Nile river, he was deified in 130 CE. Shrines, statues, rites, and games in his honor were set up in major cities across the Mediterranean world.

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