Some of the madder emperors later tried to carry on the process of putting themselves in the calendar, but were duly disobeyed after death. Detested emperors, such as Tiberius and Nero and Domitian, were even refused the apotheosis; but in general the title of divus was freely accorded, so abject had the general mind grown under autocracy; and it was usual in the provinces to worship the living emperor in a special temple in association with the Genius of Rome; while the cults of some emperors lasted long after their death. The common sense as well as the sense of humour of some rulers led them to make light of the institution; and the jest of the dying Vespasian, "I fancy I am turning God," is one of several imperial witticisms on the subject; but it lay in the nature of autocracy, in Rome as in Egypt or in Incarian Peru, to employ sagaciously all methods of abasing the human spirit, so as to secure the safety of the throne. One of the most obvious means was to deify the emperor--a procedure as "natural" in that age as the deification of Jesus, and depending on the same psychological conditions. And though the person of the emperor was seldom quite safe from assassination by his soldiery, the imperial cult played its part from the first in establishing the fatal ideal of empire. No sequence of vileness or incompetence in the emperors, no impatience of the insecurity set up by the power of the army to make and unmake the autocrat, no experience of the danger of a war of claimants, ever seems to have made Romans dream of a saner and nobler system. Manhood had been brought too low.