Rome's second king is the one who did no fighting. In a foundation legend otherwise made of abductions, fratricide and border wars, Numa Pompilius spends forty-three years inventing a religion, and the sources hand him credit for almost every priesthood, festival and calendar rule the Republic later ran on. He did it, they say, on advice from a woman he met in a grove at night — and Livy, who tells you this, also tells you flatly that Numa made her up.
Choosing a king who did not want the job
Romulus had vanished, and Rome spent a year without a king while the senators took the office in rotation and the people got tired of it.
The name that emerged was a Sabine's. Numa Pompilius lived at Cures and had a reputation for scrupulous justice and for knowing everything there was to know about divine and human law. He was not a candidate; a deputation had to go and get him, and he initially refused, saying that Rome had been founded on arms and did not need a man like him.
His inauguration is described in a way that tells you what the reign was going to be. He would not take the office on a vote alone. An augur led him up onto the citadel and sat him on a stone facing south, took the crooked staff in his right hand, marked out the regions of the sky, fixed on a landmark, and asked Jupiter for a sign — and the signs came, and only then was Numa king.
Giving a war-camp a religion
His diagnosis of the city was that it had been founded by force and expanded by war, and that the only thing capable of civilising it was fear of the gods, since fear of the gods is the one restraint that operates on a population with no laws it respects.
What follows, in the tradition, is essentially the entire Roman religious apparatus, attributed to one man:
- The calendar. He divided the year into twelve lunar months with intercalation to keep it aligned to the sun, and — more importantly for daily Roman life — he sorted the days into those on which public business could lawfully be done and those on which it could not.
- The flamens. Three great single-deity priests: one for Jupiter, one for Mars, one for Quirinus. The first of these lived under a thicket of taboos so dense that the office was periodically impossible to fill.
- The Vestals. He established the college that kept the state hearth alight, gave them a salary from the treasury, and made their persons sacred. Everything Rome later believed about Vesta descends from this attribution.
- The Salii. Twelve leaping priests of Mars who processed through the city each March in archaic armour, beating figure-of-eight shields, singing a hymn so old that by Cicero's day the priests reciting it no longer understood the words.
- The pontiffs, with a chief pontiff holding written charge of every rite, sacrifice, funeral custom and portent.
- The temple of Janus at the foot of the Argiletum, built as an index: doors open while Rome was at war, doors shut while it was at peace. In the whole of Roman history before Augustus they were shut twice — once under Numa, once after the first war with Carthage.
He also gave cults to Faith, and to Terminus the god of boundary stones, which is a pointed choice for a king whose predecessor's answer to a boundary dispute had been to kill his brother over it.
Egeria
He could not, Livy says, impose all of this by authority alone, on a people who were rough and would have laughed at it. So he manufactured a miracle.
He gave out that he met a goddess by night, and that everything he was establishing came from her. Her name was Egeria, and the meetings took place in a grove outside the city where a spring rose — the grove of the Camenae, near the Porta Capena, which he dedicated as the meeting place of the goddesses whose counsel guided him.
Livy's verb is unmistakable. He pretends. The historian who preserves the most famous divine relationship in Roman legend files it in the same paragraph as a piece of political stagecraft, and does not appear to think this diminishes Numa in the slightest — the deception is presented as statesmanship, a way of getting a violent city to hold still.
Plutarch is warmer. He gives the relationship as a genuine marriage between a mortal king and a divine being, sets out the ancient stories of gods loving mortals, and treats the sceptical version as one option among several. Ovid, later still, makes her a wife who loves Numa and cannot survive him: at his death she goes to the woods at Aricia and weeps until Diana, out of pity, dissolves her into the spring that carries her name.
The location is genuinely confused. One tradition puts her in the grove at the Porta Capena; another attaches her firmly to the sanctuary of Diana at Lake Nemi in the Alban Hills. Both cults existed, and the sources never reconcile them.
By Juvenal's time, three hundred years later, the sacred grove at the Porta Capena had been paved over and let out as lodgings, and the satirist used it as a stock example of how Rome treats its holy places.
Haggling with Jupiter
The best single episode of the reign is in Ovid's poem on the Roman calendar, and it reads like a folktale that wandered into a religious text.
Rome was being struck by lightning and Numa wanted to know how to expiate it properly. Egeria told him he would have to ask Jupiter himself, and that Jupiter would have to be compelled, and that two rustic woodland gods — Picus and Faunus — knew how it was done.
So Numa found the spring where they drank, laced the water with wine and honey, waited until they were insensible, and tied them up. Under duress they called Jupiter down out of the sky.
Then the bargaining, which is the point of the story:
Jupiter demands a head. Numa says he will cut one — an onion, dug out of his garden. Jupiter says, of a man. Numa says, then you shall have the hair from it. Jupiter says, a living thing. Numa says, a fish.
And Jupiter laughs, and accepts, and grants the rite. It is one of the few places in Roman literature where a god is outmanoeuvred by a wordplay and finds it funny, and it encodes something real: Roman ritual was contractual, the wording mattered more than the substance, and a properly worded substitution was legally sound.
Jupiter also promised a token of empire, and next morning a shield fell out of the sky. Numa had a craftsman make eleven copies so that no thief could ever identify the real one, and gave all twelve to the Salii to carry in their March procession.
After his death
He died old, in peace, having never fought a war, and the sources treat the whole reign as an interval that Rome did not deserve and did not repeat.
One curious postscript is worth knowing because it is a documented event rather than a legend. In 181 BCE, workmen on the Janiculum were said to have uncovered two stone chests, one containing Numa's body and the other his books on religion and philosophy. The books were read by the urban praetor, judged to be subversive of established religion, and burned in public by order of the Senate. Whatever was actually in those chests, the episode shows what Numa's name was worth as an authority six hundred years later — and how dangerous a text claiming it could be.
History, or something else
Numa is not a historical figure in any usable sense. The traditional dates put his reign in the early seventh century BCE, well before Rome was producing written records of any kind.
What scholars generally think is happening is retrojection. The Roman religious system was built up over centuries, out of Latin, Sabine, Etruscan and later Greek elements, and by the late Republic nobody knew where any of it had come from. Attributing the lot to a single wise founder gave it coherence and antiquity at once — the same instinct that gave Sparta all its laws from Lycurgus.
There is also a structural argument, associated with Georges Dumézil, that Romulus and Numa form a matched pair inherited from a much older Indo-European scheme: the violent, magical, boundary-breaking sovereign beside the calm, legal, contract-keeping one, in the same relation as Odin and Týr. It is an elegant reading and it is built on resemblance rather than evidence, and should be held loosely.
Questions this reign raises
Was Numa a Sabine on purpose? Yes, and the tradition needs him to be. Rome's second king comes from the people Rome had just fought and absorbed, which continues the argument that the Sabine women's intervention begins — that Rome is a fusion, not a bloodline.
Is Egeria a nymph or a goddess? The Latin sources call her both, and Roman categories were not tidy about it. She is a water-spirit attached to a spring, a source of prophetic advice, and in the Nemi tradition she is associated with childbirth. What she never has is a temple of her own inside the city.
Did Romans believe the Egeria story? Educated Romans of the late Republic largely did not, and said so; Livy's cheerful "he pretended" would not have shocked his readers. That did not stop them observing the rites she was credited with founding. Roman religion asked for correct performance, not conviction.
Why an onion, hair and a fish? Because Roman expiation worked by exact substitution, and because the story is preserving a real ritual whose components looked absurd by the time anyone wrote them down. Behind the joke there is probably an authentic archaic rite involving those three things.
Did the doors of the temple of Janus really stay shut? For part of his reign, according to every source, and the closure was remembered precisely because it was so nearly unique. Augustus closed them again and made a great deal of it, which is one reason the Numa material was being polished so enthusiastically in the generation Livy and Ovid were writing for.
Continue with Numa Pompilius, Vesta and her fire, Janus and his doors, Jupiter, and the Roman hub for how the whole system fits together.