Numa Pompilius- Roman FigureMortal"Second King of Rome"

The Augury

After Romulus vanished, Rome had no king. The Senate governed through an interregnum, each senator holding power for five days before passing it on, and the city lurched between Sabine and Roman factions. They settled on a Sabine: Numa Pompilius, a man from Cures known for his devotion to the gods and his refusal of public life.

Numa did not want the throne. Plutarch records that he told the Roman envoys a quiet life suited him better than kingship, and that a city raised on war would have no patience for a king who taught them worship. His father and a kinsman named Marcius talked him around. He traveled to Rome but would not take the crown until the gods confirmed it.

An augur led him to the Capitoline, seated him on a stone facing south, and veiled his head. The augur watched the sky. Jupiter sent the signs. Numa descended from the hill as king, and Livy says the city, which had been founded by force, was founded a second time in peace and law.

Egeria's Grove

Numa met the nymph Egeria in a grove sacred to the Camenae, outside the Porta Capena. He went to her at night, alone, and she instructed him in the rites he would bring back to Rome: how to consecrate priests and how to appease the gods whose anger brought plague and portent. Plutarch says some Romans doubted the story, but Numa's laws carried such authority that doubt did not matter. The institutions held.

Their bond lasted forty-three years, the full length of his reign. When Numa died, Ovid tells that Egeria fled Rome and collapsed in the valley below Aricia, weeping so violently that Diana turned her into a spring. The water still flowed in Ovid's day. Numa was buried at the foot of the Janiculum with a second coffin beside his, filled with the books of sacred law he had written. Centuries later, in 181 BCE, a flood exposed the coffins. The Senate read the books, judged them dangerous to religion, and burned them in the Comitium.

The Shield from Heaven

A plague struck Rome during Numa's reign. Plutarch says a bronze shield fell from the sky into Numa's hands, and with it the plague stopped. Numa declared the shield sacred and named it the ancile. But a single holy object can be stolen, so he called on the smith Mamurius Veturius to forge eleven identical copies. Mamurius worked until no one, not even Numa, could tell the original from the copies.

Numa appointed twelve priests called the Salii to guard the shields. Each March they carried all twelve ancilia through the streets of Rome, dancing in armor and striking the shields with rods, singing a hymn so old that by Quintilian's time no one fully understood the words. The procession opened the season of war. At its end the shields went back into the Regia, and Rome's safety was assured for another year.

The only payment Mamurius asked was that his name be remembered in the Salii's hymn. It was.