A Legend Doing Doctrinal Work

Modern historians of Roman religion generally treat Numa as a foundation legend rather than a securely attested historical figure, and Beard, North and Price's standard account of Roman religion is explicit that the traditions surrounding him tell us more about how later Romans understood the origin and authority of their religious institutions than about any real events of the seventh century BCE. Crediting a single semi-legendary king with founding the whole priestly apparatus let Romans treat their public religion as simultaneously very ancient, sanctioned by direct contact with the divine, and rationally instituted rather than simply accumulated over time, since later tradition also has Numa consulting privately with the nymph Egeria for religious guidance.

The Numa legend did real work across Roman history well past its own origins. Politicians and religious reformers repeatedly invoked his authority to justify changes to Roman cult practice, and in the late Republic a set of supposedly ancient religious and philosophical books attributed to Numa were discovered and then, on the Senate's order, burned as unsuitable for public circulation, an episode ancient sources themselves read as revealing about how contested and how useful the figure of Numa remained for religious argument centuries after his purported reign. His enduring role was less as a remembered individual than as the personification of Rome's claim to possess a religious order that was both properly ancient and properly ordained.