Numa Pompilius

• 1. Introduction

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  Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome, was born on the very day the city itself began. So says Plutarch, who gives that day as the 21st of April 753 BC, the traditional date for the founding of Rome. By the same tradition, Numa was the youngest of four sons. He grew into a man of severe discipline who banished luxury from his home. Later Romans credited him with an astonishing share of their religious and political institutions. Several of those institutions survived for centuries. Yet the ancient sources agree on little beyond his reputation for wisdom and piety. Why would a city shaped by its warrior founder choose such a man? What did he build, and who was said to have taught him? What became of the sacred books he supposedly wrote? And why did writers from the Roman republic to the Byzantine empire keep returning to his name?

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• 2. The Reluctant King

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  In 715 BC the Senate of Rome elected a man who did not want the job. The city had spent a year without a king after the death of Romulus. During that interregnum, senators exercised royal power in rotation, each for five days in a row. Meanwhile the followers of Romulus, the Romans, and those of Titus Tatius, the Sabines, bickered without end. A compromise finally produced Numa, a Sabine of about forty years of age.

  Numa turned the offer down. He argued that Rome, still marked by the rule of Romulus, remained a country of war. In his view it needed a commander who would lead its armies, not a man given to piety and reflection. His father and Sabine kinsmen pressed him to accept, among them his teacher and the father of his son-in-law Marcus. An embassy of two senators joined them. Summoned by the Senate from Cures, where Livy says he had been living, Numa was received with enthusiasm by the people of Rome.

  Even then he set a condition. He asked that an augur divine what the gods thought of his kingship before he agreed. Jupiter was consulted, and the omens were favourable. With the approval of the Romans, the Sabines and the heavens, Numa took up the throne.

  Plutarch reports that his first act was to disband the 300 guards known as the celeres, the "Swift", who had permanently surrounded Romulus. Ancient writers read this gesture in different ways. Some saw self-protection against men of doubtful loyalty, others saw humility, and others saw a sign of peace and moderation. The gods whose verdict Numa requested before accepting the crown would soon play a larger part in his reign than any army.

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• 3. Egeria and the Gods

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  The nymph Egeria is the most famous of the deities with whom Numa was said to have a personal bond. Legend holds that she taught him to be a wise legislator. According to Livy, Numa claimed to hold nightly consultations with her about the proper way to establish sacred rites for the city. Once those rites were settled, he appointed priests for each of the deities.

  Plutarch offers a more worldly reading. He suggests that Numa played on superstition to surround himself with an aura of awe and divine allure. The aim was to soften the manners of the warlike early Romans. They were to honour the gods, obey the law, treat enemies humanely, and live respectable lives.

  Other stories placed Numa in more direct contact with the divine. He was reputed to have forced the minor gods Picus and Faunus to deliver prophecies of things to come. With Egeria's help, he reportedly held a battle of wits with Jupiter himself, through an apparition. His goal was a ritual that would protect the city from lightning strikes and thunder.

  The best-known episode took place during a plague. A brass shield fell from the sky and was brought to Numa. He declared that Egeria had told him it was a gift from Jupiter, meant for Rome's protection. He ordered ceremonies of thanks, and the plague quickly ended. The shield, called the Ancile, became a sacred relic and was placed in the care of the Salii.

  Numa was also said to have written "sacred books" recording divine teachings, mostly from Egeria and the Muses. Plutarch, citing Valerius Antias, and Livy both say he asked to be buried with them. He preferred that the rules and rituals live on in the memory of the state priests rather than survive as relics open to forgetfulness and disuse. About half of the books were thought to cover the priesthoods he had established or developed. These included the flamines, pontifices, Salii and fetiales. The rest dealt with philosophy, called disciplina sapientiae. Plutarch and Livy disagree on how many books there were. The shield from the sky did not remain a single object for long.

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• 4. Shields and Priesthoods

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  Eleven matching copies of the fallen shield were made at Numa's order, so perfect that no one, Numa included, could tell the original from its twins. These were the Ancilia, the sacred shields of Jupiter. Each year the Salii priests carried them in procession.

  The same king is credited with creating or shaping much of Rome's priestly machinery. He established the office and duties of the Pontifex Maximus. In Plutarch's version he also added the flamen of Quirinus, honouring Romulus, to the existing flamines of Jupiter and Mars. He brought the Vestal Virgins to Rome from Alba Longa. Plutarch says there were two of them at first. Servius Tullius later raised the number to four, and it stayed there through the ages.

  Livy gives a detailed account of these foundations. His flamen of Jupiter lived in the city and wore royal insignia. The post existed so that the sacred duties the king usually performed would not be neglected whenever he went to war. Livy also names the flamines of Mars and Quirinus, the Vestals, and twelve Salii of Mars Gradivus. As pontiff, Numa chose Numa Marcius and handed over the sacred ceremonies, along with his books and seals.

  Livy then lists what the pontiff had to teach. It covered the victims for sacrifice, the proper days, the temples, and the funds to pay for the rites. It extended to funeral observances, the appeasing of the spirits of the dead, and the handling of prodigies sent by lightning. The purpose was to give the people one authority to consult. That way they would not disturb divine worship by neglecting ancestral customs or adopting foreign ones.

  Livy adds an altar to Jupiter Elicius, where Numa sought guidance on what needed expiation. He also adds a yearly festival to Fides, meaning Faith. The three major flamines rode to her temple in an arched chariot, with their hands wrapped up to the fingers. The gesture meant that faith should be sacred, like a man's right hand.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus spends far more space on these reforms. He credits Numa with eight priesthoods: curiones, flamines, celeres, augurs, vestals, salii, fetials and pontiffs. Plutarch preserves smaller rules. An uneven number of victims went to the heavenly gods and an even number to the gods below. No one could pour wine from unpruned vines as a libation. No one could sacrifice without flour. Worshippers had to turn fully around while praying.

  A god of boundaries, Terminus, also gained a cult under Numa, with sacrifices at private properties, boundaries and landmarks. The rite was meant to teach respect for lawful property and peaceful relations between neighbours. Numa also fixed the official boundaries of Rome's territory, which Romulus had never wanted. This matched one role of Vegoia in the religion of the neighbouring Etruscans. The ritual of the spolia opima is ascribed to him as well, and Arnobius says the indigitamenta were attributed to him.

  Numa mostly preferred sacrifices that were bloodless and cheap. Plutarch says he "forbade the Romans to represent the deity in the form either of man or of beast." For the first 170 years, the Romans built temples and sacred domes but placed no statue or image in them. Priests had to know which days were sacred, and Numa had reshaped the calendar to tell them.

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• 5. Order in Daily Life

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  Tradition says Numa divided the year into twelve months following the course of the moon. He adjusted the scheme so that it agreed with the solstitial revolution. January and February were introduced in this reform. He also sorted days into profane ones and sacred ones.

  Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, explains why January came first instead of March. Numa wished martial influences to give way to civil and political ones. Janus, in remote antiquity, was a patron of civil and social order and was said to have lifted human life out of a savage state. His two faces suggested that he had brought people from one sort of life to another.

  The working population got its own structure. Plutarch says Numa divided the people by trade into companies of musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, skinners, braziers and potters. All other craftsmen were gathered into a single company. Each received its own courts, councils and observances. William Blackstone argued that Numa could be credited with "originally inventing" corporations. In his telling, Numa found the city torn between rival Sabine and Roman factions. He split them into many smaller societies, one for each manual trade and profession.

  Land policy followed the same logic. Numa divided the territory around Rome into villages called pagi. Plutarch says he gave existing land to the poor and urged them to farm. He expected farming to reduce aggression, poverty and, with them, crime. He saw agriculture as an occupation "fostering character rather than wealth". Plutarch suggests that his bans on sacrificing without flour and on wine from unpruned vines were meant to push people toward farm work.

  Slavery also drew his attention. Numa forbade fathers to sell a son into slavery if the son had married with the father's consent. During the Saturnalia, he allowed slaves to feast with their masters, since they had helped to produce the year's harvest. Plutarch suggests the timing recalled a mythical Saturnian age, when Romans believed there was neither slave nor master and all were equal kinsmen.

  Plutarch detected a Spartan echo in several of these measures. He traced it to the Sabines, who claimed to be a colony of the Lacedaemonians.

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• 6. A King of Peace

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  At the foot of the Argiletum, a road in Rome, Numa built a temple of Janus to show whether the city was at war or at peace. Once he had secured peace with Rome's neighbours, the doors of the temples were shut. They stayed shut for the whole of his reign, a case Roman history never repeated.

  Plutarch presents Numa as a powerful peacemaker. Calming the Romans was one of his chief aims from the start of his reign, and many of his actions served it. Plutarch quotes a poem describing the result. Spiders spin their webs on the handles of shields. Rust eats the spears and two-edged swords. The blast of bronze trumpets no longer steals sleep from anyone's eyelids. By Plutarch's account, conflict vanished not only from Rome but from all of Italy. The roads were safe, and feasts and festivals prevailed. Nobody tried to harm Numa or take his place.

  Plutarch set this against the fate of the other kings. Romulus was a war king, and of five later kings, four were killed and one was dethroned and driven from Rome. Livy drew a related contrast. Romulus was a king of war and Numa a king of peace, so Rome learned both the arts of war and the arts of peace.

  Based on Roman chronology, Numa died of old age in 672 BC. His reign had lasted 43 years, and he was about 81. People friendly to Rome came from many places to honour him. At his own request, his body was not cremated. It was buried in a stone coffin on the Janiculum, near the altar of Fons, and Tullus Hostilius took the throne. That stone coffin on the Janiculum would not stay forgotten.

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• 7. The Burned Books

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  In 181 BC, peasants digging in the field of the scribe L. Petilius, at the foot of the Janiculum, struck two stone coffers. Livy says each was eight feet long and four feet wide. Both carried inscriptions in Latin and Greek letters. One named Numa Pompilius, son of Pompon, king of the Romans, as the man buried there. The other said that Numa's books lay inside.

  Petilius opened them on the advice of his friends. The coffer bearing the king's name was empty. The other held two bundles of seven books each. They were incomplete, yet looked very recent. Seven were in Latin and dealt with pontifical law, and seven were in Greek and dealt with the philosophy of that remote age.

  Word of the find spread. The praetor Q. Petilius, a friend of L. Petilius, asked to see the books. He judged them very dangerous to religion and told Lucius he meant to burn them. He still allowed Lucius to try to recover them by legal or other means. The scribe took his case to the tribunes of the plebs, who passed it on to the Senate. The praetor offered to swear an oath that it was wrong to read or keep such books. The Senate ruled that the offer of an oath was enough. It ordered the books burned on the Comitium as soon as possible and set an indemnity to be paid to the owner. L. Petilius refused the money. The victimarii burned the books.

  Plutarch tells a different version. He says the books surfaced some four hundred years later, after a natural accident exposed the tomb. The real gap was nearer five hundred years. In his account the Senate examined the books, judged them unfit for disclosure to the people, and burned them. Dionysius of Halicarnassus hints that the pontifices actually kept them as a close secret.

  Modern scholars read the episode in different ways. Some see the praetor's action as political, in tune with the Catonian reaction of those years. Annalists of that time, or a few years later, show no doubt about the books' authenticity. The philologist E. Peruzzi compared the versions and argued for their overall authenticity. M.J. Pena takes a more reserved and critical position.

  The francophone scholars A. Delatte and J. Carcopino believe the incident grew out of a real initiative by the Pythagorean sect of Rome. On this reading, the authorities feared the books' doctrines. They are thought to have held a physikòs lógos, a partly moral and partly cosmological interpretation of religious belief that Delatte showed to be characteristic of ancient Pythagoreanism. Part of it must have clashed with the art of lightning and bird divination and with the handling of prodigies. Most ancient authors report philosophical treatises of Pythagorean cast. Sempronius Tuditanus, by contrast, mentions only religious decrees.

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• 8. Family and Afterlife

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  Plutarch calls Numa the youngest of the four sons of Pomponius. Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines and a colleague of Romulus, gave Numa his only daughter, Tatia, in marriage. After 13 years of marriage Tatia died, and Numa withdrew to the countryside.

  Livy and Plutarch both mention a story that Pythagoras taught Numa philosophy. Both reject it as implausible in time and place.

  Plutarch reports that some writers gave Numa a single daughter, Pompilia. Her mother is named either as Tatia or as a second wife, Lucretia. Pompilia is said to have married the son of the first pontifex maximus, who was also called Numa Marcius. Their child was the future king Ancus Marcius. Other writers gave Numa five sons: Pompo, or Pomponius, Pinus, Calpus, Mamercus and Numa. From them the families of the Pomponii, Pinarii, Calpurnii, Aemilii and Pompilii traced their descent. More skeptical authors thought these genealogies were invented to raise the families' standing.

  Later centuries kept finding uses for him. The Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria claimed in his Stromata that Mosaic law influenced Numa. That, he said, was why Numa refrained from making human images in sculpture. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian I wrote his Novellae Constitutiones and named Numa beside Romulus as a founder of the Roman state. It was Numa who first organised and enhanced the city by means of laws. The Coptic monophysite bishop John of Nikiû compared Justinian's empress, Theodora, to four figures of Roman history: Romulus, Numa, Caesar and Augustus. He cited her reforms aimed at ending prostitution.

  In the 11th century, Michael Psellos wrote his Chronographia to give his student, Emperor Michael VII Doukas, models to follow. Reviewing the seven kings of Rome, Psellos praised Numa as pious and peaceable. He called him "a man not only well worth seeing for his physical appearance but also equipped with all sorts of mental virtues, and a lover of all wisdom."

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