Just as Lycurgus was believed to have provided Sparta with its laws and institutions, Numa (or Numa Pompilius) was claimed to have fulfilled that role for early Rome. Hence Plutarch’s match for his account of the Spartan is the largely legendary King of Rome who succeeded Romulus.
It has commonly been claimed that Numa was a close friend of Pythagoras, something repeated by Ovid in Book 15 of his Metamorphoses. Plutarch recognises that this involves a chronological dispute, but passes over it without taking a side, merely affirming that Numa was undoubtedly of Sabine descent. He then gives a summary of the mysterious disappearance of Romulus, thirty-seven years after Rome had been built and Romulus had become its ruler.
During the interregnum, each of the 150 senators acted as the ruler for a period of six hours in rotation. Eventually, the Roman and Sabine factions reached agreement that the Romans would choose a Sabine man to be the next king, and Numa Pompilius was agreed by both parties as the most acceptable candidate.
Numa was a virtuous man who believed that reason should overcome passions. He had eliminated luxury and extravagance from his home, and as a result of his virtue and fame had married the daughter of Tatius, the previous Sabine co-ruler with Romulus.
When Numa was invited to become the King of Rome, he declined, as he felt unable to contend with its repeated wars and strife, which he hated. The Romans appealed to him to reconsider, and he agreed to take the throne. When he went to the city, the people greeted him and voted unanimously for him to be crowned king.
Numa, though, sought divine approval, for which he resorted to augury by birds, as Romulus and Remus had done long before. When the appropriately auspicious birds appeared, Numa donned his royal robes and became the king.
Bernhard Rode’s etching of Augury from 1768-69 shows Numa with an oracle determining whether the birds were propitious; the oracle stands watching the sky, as Numa sits, his head cloaked, waiting for the verdict. Alongside him is a crown and sceptre, symbols of his imminent elevation to the throne.
Numa started his programme of reform by disbanding the three hundred close bodyguards which Romulus had kept. He added a third priest to the existing two of Jupiter and Mars, who was called Flamen Quirinalis. He then set about changing the harsh and warlike nature of the city and its citizens by means of religious rites.
Plutarch attributes much of Numa’s approach to him being a follower of Pythagoras, and the changes which Numa brought to Rome and its citizens as being in keeping with the doctrines of Pythagoras. One example is that the new king forbade the worshipping of graven images – statuary or painted – of the gods, and that animal sacrifice was also banned in view of Pythagoras’ vegetarianism.
A couple of times, Plutarch refers to a legend that Numa was in love with the nymph Egeria, although he does not mention the associated claim that the laws of Rome were dictated to Numa by that nymph. It is a story which has been quite popular with artists, though.
Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.
Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the new King of Rome.
Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a r