The Chief Priest Who Became Emperor

The word means bridge-builder.

Pontifex — from pons (bridge) and facere (to make). The pontiff is the one who builds bridges between the human and divine worlds, who maintains the channels through which communication between the two occurs, who ensures that the transactions of the sacred calendar are performed correctly so that the gods’ attention remains favorably directed toward Rome.

The Pontifex Maximus is the greatest bridge-builder: the head of the entire Roman priestly college, the supervisor of all state cult, the keeper of the sacred calendar, the judge of religious law, the overseer of the Vestal Virgins, the administrator of the god-laws (ius divinum) on which Rome’s divine relationship rests.

Numa Pompilius created the office. He needed someone to coordinate the complex system of rites, priests, and divine relationships that he was establishing under Egeria’s instruction. The Pontifex Maximus is the executive function of Numa’s religious system: the person who knows all the rules and enforces them.

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Julius Caesar campaigned for it.

In 63 BCE — the year of Cicero’s consulship, the year of the Catilinarian conspiracy — Julius Caesar ran for the office of Pontifex Maximus against two established senatorial grandees. He was deeply in debt, he had no track record in religious administration, and he was campaigning against men who were both older and more respectable. His mother, seeing him off on the morning of the election, said that she expected to see him come home either as Pontifex Maximus or in exile. He came home as Pontifex Maximus.

The political implications were immediately apparent: Caesar now controlled the sacred calendar. He could add or remove days, intercalate months, declare holidays. He could affect the timing of elections and court dates. He lived in the Regia — the ancient residence of the rex sacrorum in the Forum — which gave him a prominent official address at the center of Roman civic life.

He was assassinated before the full implications of combining religious and political authority could be worked out.

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Augustus worked them out.

When Marcus Lepidus — the second triumvir, sidelined but not removed — finally died in 12 BCE, the office of Pontifex Maximus was vacant. Augustus moved to take it, twenty years into his Principate. He had been careful not to accumulate religious honors too quickly; his mother had been deified, his adoptive father Julius Caesar had been deified, his reign was being described in religious terms by poets and provincial communities. But he had kept the formal religious office separate from the political structure.

In 12 BCE, he took the title. He moved the Pontifex Maximus’s official residence from the Regia to the Palatine — to the emperor’s palace. The two offices were now physically co-located, the religious and political executive of Rome combined in one person and one household.

Every emperor after Augustus held the title until Gratian refused it in 376 CE, on the grounds that a Christian emperor could not be the chief priest of pagan Rome.

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The title did not disappear. It migrated.

Christian bishops had been using pontifex informally since at least the third century. By the fourth century, the Bishop of Rome was beginning to accumulate the administrative functions that made the Pontifex Maximus significant: oversight of other clergy, coordination of ritual practice, adjudication of disputes between churches. By the fifth century, Pope Leo I was using the full title Pontifex Maximus for the Bishop of Rome.

The man who builds bridges between heaven and earth changed his theology. He kept his title. The bridge-building function — interpreting the divine will, coordinating the human response, maintaining the ritual calendar, supervising the vowed women — continued in its new institutional form.

The Pontifex Maximus is still the Bishop of Rome. He lives, as Augustus arranged, on the Palatine Hill — which is to say, he lives a mile from where the story began, in the city that Romulus founded and that religious needs organized, maintaining the bridge that Numa first built.