[73.1] The last branch of the ordinances of Numa related to the sacred offices allotted to those who held the higher priesthoods and the greatest power among the Romans. These, from one of the duties they perform, namely, the repairing of the wooden bridge, are in their own language called pontifices; but they have jurisdiction over the most weighty matters. [2] For they the judges in all religious causes wherein private citizens, magistrates or the ministers of the gods are concerned; they make laws for the observance of any religious rites, not established by written law or custom, which may seem to them worthy of receiving the sanction of law and custom; they inquire into the conduct of all magistrates to whom the performance of any sacrifice or other religious duty is committed, and also into that of all the priests; they take care that their servants and ministers whom they employ in religious rites commit no error in the matter of the sacred laws; to the laymen who are unacquainted with such matters they are the expounders and interpreters of everything relating to the worship of the gods and genii; and if they find that any disobey their orders, they inflict punishment upon them with due regard to every offence; moreover, they are not liable to any prosecution or punishment, nor are they accountable to the senate or to the people, at least concerning religious matters. [3] Hence, if anyone wishes to call them hierodidaskaloi, hieronomoi, hierophylakes, or, as I think proper, hierophantai, he will not be in error. When one of them dies, another is appointed in his place, being chosen, not by the people, but by the pontifices themselves, who select the person they think best qualified among their fellow citizens; and the one thus approved of receives the priesthood, provided the omens are favourable to them. [4] These — not to speak of others less important — are the greatest and the most notable regulations made by Numa concerning religious worship and divided by him according to the different classes of sacred rites; and through these it came about that the city increased in piety.
[74.1] His regulations, moreover, that tended to inspire frugality and moderation in the life of the individual citizen and to create a passion for justice, which preserves the harmony of the State, were exceedingly numerous, some of them being comprehended in written laws, and others not written down but embodied in custom and long usage. To treat of all these would be a difficult task; but mention of the two of them which have been most frequently cited will suffice to give evidence of the rest. [2] First, to the end that people should be content with what they had and should not covet what belonged to others, there was the law that appointed boundaries to every man’s possessions. For, having ordered every one to draw a line around his own land and to place stones on the bounds, he consecrated these stones to Jupiter Terminalis and ordained that all should assemble at the place every year on a fixed day and offer sacrifices to them; and he made the festival in honour of these gods of boundaries among the most dignified of all. [3] This festival the Romans call Terminalia, from the boundaries, and the boundaries themselves, by the change of one letter as compared with our language, they call termines. He also enacted that, if any person demolished or displaced these boundary stones he should be looked upon as devoted to the god, to the end that anyone who wished might kill him a sacrilegious person with impunity and without incurring any stain of guilt. [4] He established this law with reference not only to private possessions but also to those belonging to the public; for he marked these also with boundary stones, to the end that the gods of boundaries might distinguish the lands of the Romans from those of their neighbours, and the public lands from such as belonged to private persons. Memorials of this custom are observed by the Romans down to our times, purely as a religious form. For they look upon these boundary stones as gods and sacrifice to them yearly, offering up no kind of animal (for it is not lawful to stain these stones with blood), but cakes made of cereals and other first-fruits of the earth. [5] But they ought still to observe the motive, as well, which led Numa to regard these boundary stones as gods and content themselves with their own possessions without appropriating those of others either by violence or by fraud; whereas now there are some who, in disregard of what is best and of the example of their ancestors, instead of distinguishing that which is theirs from that which belongs to others, set as bounds to their possessions, not the law, but their greed to possess everything, — which is disgraceful behaviour. But we leave the considerations of these matters to others.
[75.1] By such laws Numa brought the State to frugality and moderation. And in order to encourage the observance of justice in the matter of contracts, he hit upon a device which was unknown to all who have established the most celebrated institutions. For, observing that contracts made in public and before witnesses are, out of respect for the persons present, generally observed and that few are guilty of any violation of them, but that those which are made without witnesses — and these are much more numerous than the others — rest on no other security than the faith of those who make them, he thought it incumbent on him to make this faith the chief object of his care and to render it worthy of divine worship. [2] For he felt that Justice, Themis, Nemesis, and those the Greeks call Erinyes, with other concepts of the kind, had been sufficiently revered and worshipped as gods by the men of former times, but that Faith, than which there is nothing greater nor more sacred among men, was not yet worshipped either by states in their public capacity or by private persons. [3] As the result of these reflexions he, first of all men, erected a temple to the Public Faith and instituted sacrifices in her honour at the public expense in the same manner as to the rest of the gods. And in truth the result was bound to be that this attitude of good faith and constancy on the part of the State toward all men would in the course of time render the behaviour of the individual citizens similar. In any case, so revered and inviolable a thing was good faith in their estimation, that the greatest oath a man could take was by his own faith, and this had greater weight than all the testimony taken together. And if there was any dispute between one man and another concerning a contract entered into without witnesses, the faith of either of the parties was sufficient to decide the controversy and prevent it from going any farther. [4] And the magistrates and courts of justice based their decisions in most causes on the oaths of the parties attesting by their faith. Such regulations, devised by Numa at that time to encourage moderation and enforce justice, rendered the Roman State more orderly than the best regulated household.
[76.1] But the measures which I am now going to relate made it both careful to provide itself with necessaries and industrious in acquiring the advantages that flow from labour. For this man, considering that a State which was to love justice and to continue in the practice of moderation ought to abound in all things necessary to the support of life, divided the whole country into what are called pagi or “districts,” and over each of these districts he appointed an official whose duty it was to inspect and visit the lands lying in his own jurisdiction. [2] These men, going their rounds frequently, made a record of the lands that were well and ill cultivated and laid it before the king, who repaid the diligence of the careful husbandmen with commendations and favours, and by reprimanding and fining the slothful encouraged them to cultivate their lands with greater attention. Accordingly, the people, being freed from wars and exempt from any attendance on the affairs of the State, and at the same time being disgraced and punished for idleness and sloth, all became husbandmen and looked upon the riches which the earth yields and which of all others are the most just as more enjoyable than the precarious influence of a military life. [3] And by the same means Numa came to be beloved of his subjects, the example of his neighbours, and the theme of posterity. It was owing to these measures that neither civil dissension broke the harmony of the State nor foreign war interrupted the observance of his most excellent and admirable institutions. For their neighbours were so far from looking upon the peaceful tranquillity of the Romans as an opportunity for attacking them, that, if at any time they were at war with one another, they chose the Romans for mediators and wished to
settle their enmities under the arbitration of Numa. [4] This man, therefore, I should take no shame in placing among the foremost of those who have been celebrated for their felicity in life. For he was of royal birth and of royal appearance; and he pursued an education which was not the kind of useless training that deals only with words, but a discipline that taught him to practise piety and every other virtue. [5] When he was young he was thought worthy to assume the sovereignty over the Romans, who had invited him to that dignity upon the reputation of his virtue; and he continued to command the obedience of his subjects during his whole life. He lived to a very advanced age without any impairment of his faculties and without suffering any blow at Fortune’s hands; and he died the easiest of all deaths, being withered by age, the genius who had been allotted to him from his birth having continued the same favour to him till he disappeared from among men. He lived more than eighty years and reigned forty-three, leaving behind him, according to most historians, four sons and one daughter, whose posterity remain to this day; but according to Gnaeus Gellius he left only one daughter, who was the mother of Ancus Marcius, the second king of the Romans after him. [6] His death was greatly lamented by the state, which gave him a most splendid funeral. He lies buried upon the Janiculum, on the other side of the river Tiber. Such is the account we have received concerning Numa Pompilius.
BOOK III
[1.1] After the death of Numa Pompilius the senate, being once more in full control of the commonwealth, resolved to abide by the same form of government, and as the people did not adopt any contrary opinion, they appointed some of the older senators to govern as interreges for a definite number of days. These men, pursuant to the unanimous desire of the people, chose as king Tullus Hostilius, whose descent was as follows. [2] From Medullia, a city which had been built by the Albans and made a Roman colony by Romulus after he had taken it by capitulation, a man of distinguished birth and great fortune, named Hostilius, had removed to Rome and married a woman of the Sabine race, the daughter of Hersilius, the same woman who had advised her country-women to go as envoys to their fathers on behalf of their husbands at the time when the Sabines were making war against the Romans, and was regarded as the person chiefly responsible for the alliance then concluded by the leaders of the two nations. This man, after taking part with Romulus in many wars and performing mighty deeds in the battles with the Sabines, died, leaving an only son, a young child at the time, and was buried by the kings in the principal part of the Forum and honoured with a monument and an inscription testifying to his valour. [3] His only son, having come to manhood and married a woman of distinction, had by her Tullius Hostilius, a man of action, the same who was now chosen king by a vote passed by the citizens concerning him according to the laws; and the decision of the people was confirmed by favourable omens from Heaven. The year in which he assumed the sovereignty was the second of the twenty-seventh Olympiad, the one in which Eurybates, an Athenian, won the prize in the foot-race, Leostratus being archon at Athens. [4] Tullus, immediately upon his accession, gained the hearts of all the labouring class and of the needy among the populace by performing an act of the most splendid kind. It was this: The kings before him had possessed much fertile land, especially reserved for them, from the revenues of which they not only offered sacrifices to the gods, but also had abundant provision for their private needs. This land Romulus had acquired in war by dispossessing the former owners, and when he died childless, Numa Pompilius, his successor, had enjoyed its use; it was no longer the property of the state, but the inherited possession of the successive kings. [5] Tullus now permitted this land to be divided equally among such of the Romans as had no allotment, declaring that his own patrimony was sufficient both for the sacrifices and for his personal expenditures. By this act of humanity he relieved the poor among the citizens by freeing them from the necessity of labouring as serfs on the estates of others. And, to the end that none might lack a habitation either, he included within the city wall the hill called the Caelian, where those Romans who were unprovided with dwellings were allotted a sufficient amount of ground and built houses; and he himself had his residence in this quarter. These, then, are the memorable actions reported of this king so far as regards his civil administration.
[2.1] Many military exploits are related of him, but the greatest are those which I shall now narrate, beginning with the war against the Albans. The man responsible for the quarrel between the two cities and the severing of their bond of kinship was an Alban named Cluilius, who had been honoured with the chief magistracy; this man, vexed at the prosperity of the Romans and unable to contain his envy, and being by nature headstrong and somewhat inclined to madness, resolved to involve the cities in war with each other. [2] But not seeing how he could persuade the Albans to permit him to lead an army against the Romans without just and urgent reasons, he contrived a plan of the following sort: he permitted the poorest and boldest of the Albans to pillage the fields of the Romans, promising them immunity, and so caused many to overrun the neighbouring territory in a series of plundering raids, as they would now be pursuing without danger gains from which they would never desist even under the constraint of fear. [3] In doing this he was following a very natural line of reasoning, as the event bore witness. For he assumed that the Romans would not submit to being plundered but would rush to arms, and he would thus have an opportunity of accusing them to his people as the aggressors in the war; and he also believed that the majority of the Albans, envying the prosperity of their colony, would gladly listen to these false accusations and would begin war against the Romans. And that is just what happened. [4] For when the worst elements of each city fell to robbing and plundering each other and at last a Roman army made an incursion into the territory of the Albans and killed or took prisoner many of the bandits, Cluilius assembled the people and inveighed against the Romans at great length, showed them many who were wounded, produced the relations of those who had been seized or slain, and at the same time added other circumstances of his own invention; whereupon it was voted on his motion to send an embassy first of all to demand satisfaction for what had happened, and then, if the Romans refused it, to begin war against them.
[3.1] Upon the arrival of the ambassadors at Rome, Tullius, suspecting that they had come to demand satisfaction, resolved to anticipate them in doing this, since he wished to turn upon the Albans the blame for breaking the compact between them and their colony. For there existed a treaty between the two cities which had been made in the reign of Romulus, wherein, among other articles, it was stipulated that neither of them should begin a war, but if either complained of any injury whatsoever, that city would demand satisfaction from the city which had done the injury, and failing to obtain it, should then make war as a matter of necessity, the treaty being looked upon as already broken. [2] Tullius, therefore, taking care that the Romans should not be the first called upon to give satisfaction and, by refusing it, become guilty in the eyes of the Albans, ordered the most distinguished of his friends to entertain the ambassadors of the Albans with every courtesy and to detain them inside their homes while he himself, pretending to be occupied with some necessary business, put off their audience. [3] The following night he sent to Alba some Romans of distinction, duly instructed as to the course they should pursue, together with the fetiales, to demand satisfaction from the Albans for the injuries the Romans had received. These, having performed their journey before sunrise, found Cluilius in the market-place at the time when the early morning crowd was gathered there. And having set forth the injuries which the Romans had received at the hands of the Albans, they demanded that he should act in conformity with the compact between the cities. [4] But Cluilius, alleging that the Albans had been first in sending envoys to Rome to demand satisfaction and had not even been vouchsafed an answer, ordered the Romans to depart, on the ground that they had violated the terms of the treaty, and declared war against them. The chief of the embassy, however, as he was departing, demanded from Cluilius an
answer to just this one question, namely, whether he admitted that those were violating the treaty who, being the first called upon to give satisfaction, had refused to comply with any part of their obligation. [5] And when Cluilius said he did, he exclaimed: “Well, then, I call the gods, whom we made witnesses of our treaty, to witness that the Romans, having been the first to be refused satisfaction, will be undertaking a just war against the violators of that treaty, and that it is you Albans who have avoided giving satisfaction, as the events themselves show. For you, being the first called upon for satisfaction, have refused it and you have been the first to declare war against us. Look, therefore, for vengeance to come upon you ere long with the sword.” [6] Tullius, having learned of all this from the ambassadors upon their return to Rome, then ordered the Albans to be brought before him and to state the reasons for their coming; and when they had delivered the message entrusted to them by Cluilius and were threatening war in case they did not obtain satisfaction, he replied: “I have anticipated you in doing this, and having obtained nothing that the treaty directs, I declare against the Albans the war that is both necessary and just.”
Delphi Complete Works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 79) Page 20