The hierarchical outlook that many philosophical representations of the divine tend to assume in the Post-Hellenistic period has repeatedly been remarked upon. The representation of the highest god as a king is of course traditional and can be traced at least to Hesiod, but a wide array of texts from between about 100 bc and ad 200 start to depict the pantheon in its entirety as consisting of a single leader who commands a number of subordinate servants by means of a tight hierarchy. To do so, Post-Hellenistic philosophers draw on numerous traditional comparisons to express this hierarchical relationship between a highest god and his subordinates, such as the relation between a general and his army, the koryphaios and the chorus, and the shepherd and his flock. Other figures to whom the highest god is likened are the householder, father, and ship's captain. Two images stand out, however, because they first occur in this period and do so relatively frequently: the Roman emperor and his bureaucrats on the one hand, and the Great King and his satraps on the other.

Such images have been analysed in three major ways. First, they have been explained as attempts to reconcile an increased stress on divine transcendence in philosophy of this period and the widespread idea that god does intervene in some way in the sublunary world. By its very structure, the hierarchy links our human world to the ineffable, invisible and unreachable highest god through a chain of lesser divine beings. Alternatively, as has been suggested mainly by scholars interested in the history of religion, such hierarchies were one of the ways in which philosophers succeeded in reconciling the traditional pantheon and its bewildering variety of gods with the monistic demands of philosophy: by giving each god a place in the hierarchy, the unity of divine will and action is vouchsafed. In doing so, philosophers are said to have responded to a wider religious tendency to emphasise the divine as hierarchically organised. Others still have noticed the clear political content of depictions of gods as the Roman emperor or the Persian Great King and propose to consider them as ideological justifications of the dominant imperial power.