Numa Pompilius

715 b.c.e.–673 b.c.e.

Second king of Rome
Founder of Roman religion

The Calendar of Numa.

Numa Pompilius may never have existed, but the Romans looked back to him as the founder of their religion. According to Roman myth, Numa became the second king of Rome after Romulus was snatched up to Heaven to become the god Quirinus, or according to another version, murdered by the senators. He was credited with reforming the ritual calendar of Rome and establishing the priesthoods and the cult of Vesta. Before Numa, Rome had used a calendar of ten months, beginning with March, which it took over from Alba Longa, Romulus' native town in Latium. Numa drew up a lunar calendar of twelve months, with extra days inserted by the pontiffs to keep it congruent with the solar year. He fixed days which were lawful for business (fasti) and unlawful (nefasti), and he set the days for religious festivals.

The Roman Ritual Calendar.

Numa's calendar may be mythical, but the Romans did have a ritual calendar. Broken inscriptions from Rome and vicinity have preserved fragments of more than forty copies of it. None are exactly the same, but all have roughly the same forty festivals marked in capital letters. While the person who drew up the calendar may not have been Numa, at least the calendar which the Romans thought was Numa's probably did exist.

The Cult of Vesta.

Numa can hardly have founded the cult of Vesta. Her worship parallels the cult of Hestia in the Greek cities, and Roman legend remembered that Alba Longa also had a cult of Vesta. Vesta had a temple of her own in Rome, and she was attended by six Vestal Virgins, the only priestesses in the Roman priestly establishment. The priestesses of Vesta may show that Vesta's cult dates back to a time before Roman society became rigidly patriarchal. The remains of the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum and the House of the Vestal Virgins beside it can still be seen. Archaeologists have found votive offerings which were deposited in the forum temple as early as 575 b.c.e., and remains found in the House of the Vestals are even earlier. While these dates indicate that the cult of Vesta began after the death of Numa, Numa could have organized the cult of Vesta first in his own house, with his own unmarried daughters as Vesta's attendants. Only later did the Vesta cult move to its own temple after the Roman Forum was drained, and the number of Vestal priestesses became six. They had to remain virgins for the thirty-year term of their priesthood, and a Vestal who lost her virginity would be buried alive.

Numa's Other Contributions.

Numa was also credited with creating the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter, to take over some of his own ritual duties. He also created priests for Mars and Quirinus. He was also credited with building the Regia in the Roman Forum, which housed the armor sacred to Mars: one shield was said to have dropped from Heaven. The Regia was later the official headquarters of the pontifex maximus, or high priest of Rome, and in spite of the fact that the word "Regia" can be translated as "royal palace," it seems never to have been a residence. The first structure built on the site of the Regia was an open-air sanctuary. Another legend about Numa made him a disciple of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who had a group of followers in the Greek settlement of Croton on the Gulf of Taranto in Italy, and then in Metapontum after they were expelled from Croton. Chronology, however, gets in the way of the legend. Pythagoras emigrated from Samos to Croton about 530 b.c.e., long after Numa died.

sources

A. K. Michels, The Calendar of the Roman Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy Books 1–5 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press).

Plutarch, "Life of Numa," in Parallel Lives. Rev. A. H. Clough (Boston: Little Brown, 1909).