Numa and the Nymph Who Teaches Religion

Romulus founded Rome with a sword.

Numa Pompilius is given Rome when it has a sword and nothing else. He is a Sabine, from the hill town of Cures — which is itself a deliberate irony in the Roman founding story, since Rome’s most lasting institution-builder is a man from the people whose women Rome stole. He is old when they choose him, or old enough: a man known throughout the region for his piety and learning. He refuses the crown twice before accepting it. This is the Roman ideal of the magistrate: the man who must be persuaded to serve.

He inherits a city that knows only war. His predecessor’s reign was thirty-seven years of combat, expansion, and the founding violence that created the city. Numa’s reign will be forty-three years with a single year of war. He will close the temple of Janus — whose open gates signal active military engagement — and it will remain closed for his entire reign. Subsequent Romans will note that the temple of Janus was only closed twice in the following seven centuries: once under Numa, once under Augustus. This tells you something about Rome. It also tells you something about what Numa achieved.

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He receives his religious instructions from Egeria.

She is a water-nymph, one of the Camenae — Italian water-goddesses of prophecy who inhabit springs. Her spring is in a grove outside the Porta Capena, one of Rome’s gates, in a valley where the ancient Latin road begins its journey south. Numa goes to her at night, or she comes to him at his house near the Forum, or the meetings happen in the grove itself. The sources differ on the logistics. They agree on the substance: she instructs him.

The instructions she delivers constitute the whole apparatus of Roman state religion.

Numa establishes the flamines — the specialized priests assigned to individual gods, each bound by elaborate ritual prohibitions. The Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter, cannot touch iron, cannot look upon an army, cannot touch a dog or a raw horse, cannot have a knot in his clothing, cannot leave the city for a night, cannot touch dead things. These rules are so specific and so peculiar that later Romans will debate their meaning for centuries. Numa’s answer, in the story, is simple: this is what Egeria told me Jupiter requires.

He establishes the Vestal Virgins — the six women who tend the sacred flame that represents Rome’s continuity. He establishes the rex sacrorum, the king-of-rites who will continue the religious functions of kingship after Rome abolishes kings. He establishes the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest who coordinates the whole religious system. He divides the year into twelve months and assigns the sacred days, the feast days, the nefasti days when no business can be done, the market days that punctuate the working year.

All of this, Rome will say for centuries afterward, comes from the grove and the nymph and the old Sabine king who was wise enough to listen.

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There is a second divine meeting in the tradition.

At one point in Numa’s reign, the Romans are terrorized by miraculous phenomena — thunder, portents, sky-signs that suggest divine anger. Numa summons Faunus and Picus, the old Italian woodland gods, by mixing wine and honey in their spring and catching them when they come to drink. They struggle and transform, cycling through animal forms, but he holds them until they agree to help. They tell him how to capture Jupiter himself for an audience.

Numa follows their instructions. Jupiter comes down.

The god and the king negotiate. Jupiter demands a human sacrifice. Numa counter-offers, substituting onions for heads, fish for a man. Jupiter accepts the substitutions — impressed, or amused. He tells Numa that Rome will be protected by divine favor and gives him the secret formula for averting lightning.

The lightning-aversion rite is called the Fulgur conditum — the lightning buried. When lightning strikes Roman ground, priests bury the strike in a sealed pit with the proper ritual. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, notes that these procedures are still performed in his day, and that they derive from Numa.

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When Egeria learns that Numa has died, she weeps herself into a spring.

Ovid tells this part of the story in the Metamorphoses: the nymph at her spring, inconsolable, dissolving into water, becoming permanently the thing she always was. Diana, out of pity, transforms her tears into a perpetual spring that bears her name. The grove outside the Porta Capena will bear her name for centuries. Roman brides come there to seek her blessing before marriage.

What Egeria weeps for is not just a man. She weeps for the one king in Rome’s history who made religion, rather than war, the measure of a reign. Every Roman priest, every temple, every sacred calendar that organizes the city’s year descends from what she told Numa in the grove at night. Her tears are the water the city drinks. Her instructions are the structure inside which Roman public life moves.

Rome will have many kings before it abolishes kings. It will have one king who deserved the title given to his successors: Father of the Fatherland. He was a Sabine. He learned what he needed from a woman. His city honored both facts and forgot neither.