Numa Pompilius

Roman historical tradition, recorded most fully by Livy and Plutarch centuries after the events it describes, credits Numa Pompilius with an extraordinary act of religious institution building during a reign conventionally dated to the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE. Elected king by the Roman senate after a deliberate year long interregnum following Romulus's disappearance, Numa is said to have found a city skilled in war and lacking in ordered worship, and to have set about supplying exactly that. Tradition assigns him the founding of the pontifical college, charged with overseeing Roman religious law generally, the augurs, who read the will of the gods in the flight of birds, the flamens, priests dedicated individually to particular gods such as Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, and the Vestal Virgins, who tended Rome's sacred hearth fire in the temple of Vesta and whose perpetual virginity was treated as bound up with the city's own safety.

Numa is also credited with building the temple of Janus, whose doors were closed only in times of full peace, and with reforming the Roman calendar from ten months to twelve by adding January and February, bringing it closer into line with the solar year. Ancient sources disagree on how far to credit an actual historical Numa with all of this institutional invention, but the consistent thread across the tradition is that whatever existed of Roman public religion by the historical period was retrojected onto his reign as its founding moment.

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.