Numa Pompilius
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According to legend, Numa Pompilius was the second of the Kings of Rome, succeeding Romulus. After Romulus died, Romans in the city elected a Sabine man to be king, so as to make him loyal to both tribes in Rome.
Plutarch tells that Numa was the youngest of Pomponius's four sons, born on the day of the foundation of Rome. He lived a severe life of discipline and he banished all luxury from his home. Tatius, colleague of Romulus, married his only daughter, Tatia, to Numa. She died after being married to Numa for 13 years and Numa retired to a country life, advised by the nymph Egeria who met him by her spring in a sacred grove and taught him to be a wise legislator. Plutarch reports that some authors credited him with only a single daughter, Pompilia, others also gave him four sons, Pompo, Pinus, Calpus and Mamercus, from whom the noble familes of Pomponii, Pinarii, Calpurnii and Aemilii traced their decent. Other writers believed that this was merely a flattery invented to curry favor. Pompilia, whose mother is variously named as Numa's first wife Tatia and his second wife Lucretia, supposedly married Marcius II and had the future King Ancus Marcius.
Numa was around forty when he was offered the kingship. He was residing "at a famous city of the Sabines called Cures, whence the Romans and Sabines gave themselves the joint name of Quirites" (Plutarch), and he at first refused, but his father and Marcius I (Marcius II's father) took him aside and persuaded him to accept.
He was later celebrated for his natural wisdom and piety. Wishing to show his favour, the god Jupiter caused a shield to fall from the sky on the Palatine Hill, which had letters of prophecy written on it, and in which the fate of Rome as a city was tied up. Recognizing the importance of this sacred shield, King Numa had eleven matching shields made. These shields were the ancilia, the sacred shields of Jupiter, which were carried each year in a procession by the Salii priests.
By tradition, Numa promulgated a calendar reform that adjusted the solar and lunar years, and he established the original constitution of the priests, called Pontifices. In other Roman institutions established by Numa, Plutarch thought he detected a Laconian influence, attributing the connection to the Sabine culture of Numa, for "Numa was descended of the Sabines, who declare themselves to be a colony of the Lacedaemonians."
Numa was credited with dividing the immediate territory of Roman into pagi and establishing the traditional occupational guilds of Rome:
- "So, distinguishing the whole people by the several arts and trades, he formed the companies of musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, skinners, braziers, and potters; and all other handicraftsmen he composed and reduced into a single company, appointing every one their proper courts, councils, and religious observances." (Plutarch)
Plutarch, in like manner, tells of the early religion of the Romans, that it was imageless and spiritual. Their religious lawgiver, Numa, he says, “forbade the Romans to represent the deity in the form either of man or of beast. Nor was there among them formerly any image or statue of the Divine Being; during the first one hundred and seventy years they built temples, indeed, and other sacred domes, but placed in them no figure of any kind; persuaded that it is impious to represent things Divine by what is perishable, and that we can have no conception of God but by the understanding.”
Numa Pompilius died in 673 BC when he was older than eighty. He died of old age and by a gentle and gradual decline. He was succeeded by Tullus Hostilius.
His history is considered legend because of a number of inconsistences in the data historically recorded about him. The most famous was that he was a friend of Pythagoras, who is traditionally thought to have died around 500 B.C [ref: Mommsen, T. The History of Rome].
| Preceded by Romulus |
King of Rome 717–673 |
Succeeded by Tullus Hostilius |
[edit] Further reading
- Mark Silk (2004). "Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (4): 863-96.
[edit] External links
- Numa Pompilius' life according to Plutarch
- Livy's From the Founding of the City, Book 1: The Earliest Legends of Rome
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| Romulus 753–717 - Numa Pompilius 717–673- Tullus Hostilius 673–642 - Ancus Marcius 642–617 - |
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