Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part Three of Three)

The first two portions of this essay can be read here and here.

There are two final aspects of Numa’s reign that bear some consideration before moving on to Plutarch’s comparison of Numa and Lycurgus. The most convincing piece of evidence that Plutarch presents in proving some connection between Numa and Pythagoras comes in a discussion of Numa’s preferred mode of worship. In addition to reorganizing the clergy of the city to reflect this shift away from wanton war-making, Numa issued two edicts that run counter to everything happening in Greece or Italia at the time. The first was a ban on idolatry and, the second, the reliance on the oral tradition rather than the written one to impart the most important aspects of culture.

Plutarch writes that, “Numa forbade the Romans to represent God in the form of a man or beast, nor was there any painted or graven images of a deity admitted amongst them” on the basis of his belief that saw “the first principle of being as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt, and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence” [53]. This is interesting because it mirrors a transition that took place among a people deeply committed to the written language as their primary means of transmission. Numa may have found the oral tradition more effective for dampening factional disputes that arise over the interpretation of fixed writing. Whatever the reason, we may infer that in the next few centuries, Rome turned away from the anthropomorphic pantheistic religions that surrounded them and, in a very real sense, gave them a cultural distinction that could not easily be absorbed by influence from the Greeks or Gauls.

One must also assume that the emphasis on the spoken word caused rapid developments in the Roman language due to the new complexity of topics it was being asked to handle. Plutarch makes many remarks about the similarity of words from the Roman lexicon that borrowed on Greek vocabulary extensively. Perhaps it was the oral codification that led to the development of a stable and separate language, Latin, to emerge in its full potential some seven to eight hundred years later (depending on who you believe) to replace Greek as the language of culture.

Plutarch’s comparison of Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius

The complete text of Plutarch’s Lycurgus and Numa Compared can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/n_l_comp.html and uses the same translation as this essay. Page numbers correspond to the 2nd ed of the Great Books series from Encyclopedia Britannica.

For all of their similarities, Plutarch finds Numa and Lycurgus to be studies in puzzling contradiction. Noting first those elements of their reforms held in common (the disdain for luxury, the use of religion to enforce the mandates of the state), Plutarch moves on to systematically contrasting their differences. Numa’s primary goal was to temper the war-like character of the Roman and Sabine peoples while Lycurgus instituted rigorous martial obligations (not unlike the samurai of Japan) upon those who would claim to be Spartan, though for the purpose of self-defense more than expansion. Of the two, Plutarch finds Numa’s goals more virtuous as seeking the good as its own end whereas the good that Lycurgus seeks is one that offers something, namely, security and, for his city, immortality. Plutarch also notes that while Numa’s reforms improved the lot of slaves, those of Lycurgus seemed more sympathetic to the rights of women as daughters, wives, mothers, if not as people.

Another drastic divergence between the two was their attitude towards wealth. For Lycurgus, the inequitable distribution of land (and therefore wealth) was the fundamental evil that had corrupted what we can only assume he believed was once a stable and virtuous system of governance. Plutarch gives no record of Numa taking great concern about the vice of greed beyond offering lands outside the city to farm for the less fortunate living within it. Otherwise, he suggests, Numa allowed, “free scope [beyond war-making] to every other means of obtaining wealth; nor did he endeavor to do away with inequality in this respect, but permitted riches to be amassed to any extent, and paid no attention to the gradual and continual augmentation and influx of poverty” [63].

The final irony is that, though Lycurgus’ system of governance was more autocratic and his goals, less lofty than his Roman counterpart, it was his reforms which lasted the test of time. Most were still in practice during the Peloponnesian War, some four hundred years later, and, by Plutarch’s account, “so soon as the Lacedaemonians fell from the institutions of Lycurgus, they sank from the highest to the lowest state” [64]. Most of Numa’s reforms, in contrast, were undone immediately upon his death and Rome reignited its engines of war, consuming first the kingdoms of the Italian peninsula before moving on to the world stage with yet grander schemes of world domination.

Are we to infer from this that aspiration to the higher virtue does not always equal success using the standards by which history measures the evolution of human culture? Plutarch himself seems perplexed as to the lesson history teaches here, noting in his closing that, “A question like that will need a long answer, if it is to be one to satisfy men who take the better to consist in riches, luxury, and dominion, rather than in security, gentleness, and that independence which is accompanied by justice” [64].

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part 2)

Part One of this essay can be read here.

In the end, Numa is convinced by his father and kinsmen to accept the responsibility and ascend the throne of Rome as its king. After making the appropriate sacrifices, he proceeded there, only to be met by crowds of politicians and well-wishers as he neared the city, creating a sense, according to Plutarch, “that they seemed to be receiving, not a new king, but a new kingdom” [52]. Numa refused to take the robe and scepter of rule until his ascension had been formally sanctioned by the gods of the city who, conveniently, provided the oracle necessary to move things forward.

In his initial moves as he takes power, we see that Numa plans to act according to his virtue and try and pacify the warlike Roman peoples. In his first act, he disbands the Celeres, a group of one hundred bodyguards loyal to the King and not the city (much like the Praetorian guard of later imperial Rome). One can imagine that the oligarchs and citizens alike saw this as a marked shift from Romulus’ often bloody style of rule. In his second act, he established a divine cult to Quirinus (the transfigured version of Romulus), no doubt to soothe tensions among those once loyal to the former king about who had murdered him.

These two edicts seem, on the surface, innocuous enough but, actually provide us a blueprint for how Numa would go on to reshape the Roman culture. As he surveyed that which he had found himself in charge of, Plutarch writes that he found a city that was:

In its origin, formed by daring and warlike spirits, whom bold and desperate adventure brought thither from every quarter, it had found in perpetual war and incursions on its neighbors its after sustenance and means of growth, and in conflict with danger the source of new strength; like piles, which the blows of the hammer serve to fix into the ground [53].

In order to pacify the Roman lust for war, Numa used the tools of religion available to him to transform the people from soldiers to farmers. By mixing traditional religion in with a few supernatural innovations of his own, Numa was able to create an environment where adhering to the old ways of doing things would be considered impious. He also transformed the clergy into an arm of government in its own right, mediating disputes between citizens as well as making the conditions that make war possible as difficult as possible to achieve. So, it is said, only during the reign of Numa Pompilius were the gates to the Temple of Mars left closed, indicating the city was at peace with the known world.

More profoundly, Numa delivered a mechanism to dissolve the kin ties that separated Roman from Sabine and kept tensions between the two groups as a constant sub-text to any political progress in the city. To combat this, Numa established trade guilds that segregated people into groups dictated by their skills and vocation, rather than by their ancestral heritage. This also allowed some amount of collective political power to accrue in the hands of those that might otherwise have no voice in governance.

There are two more elements of Numa’s reforms that are particular interesting in their relation to one another. First, he eschewed the practice of using live animals for sacrifice to the gods, preferring, instead, “flour, wine, and the least costly offerings” [53]. Secondly, he placed great emphasis on the piety and patriotism of farming as a vocation but taking the lands won by Romulus and dividing it up among the “indigent commonality” [59] so that the ills of poverty might be mitigated and the lands adjacent to Rome, better kept. This attention paid to agriculture and animal husbandry suggest that Rome was transforming from a nomadic tribal culture to a more stable, agrarian one. Little did Numa know that those values would be the same to eventually push Rome further and further afield in order to supply their unending need for food as their population exploded.

Plutarch spends considerable time in this biography exploring the idea that Numa’s reforms were related to the Pythagoreans and, indeed, draw a parallel between Rome and the famed philosopher’s own attempt to get involved in politics. He is able to produce no historical evidence that the two men ever met, or were even alive at the same time, yet, in the midst of contrasting cryptic homilies associated with both legendary figures, Plutarch does reveal a meaningful truth about the Roman audience for which he is writing. As a philosopher himself, Numa would have been deeply interested to hear of innovative ideas and, as it so happens, Pythagoras conducted the majority of his social science experiments closer to Rome than his home island of Samos. So, in that sense, it is feasible that some kernel of Pythagorean thought may have well spread to Rome early in its conception. Whatever the truth behind it, this idea that Numa brought Pythagoras’ wisdom to the Roman people feeds into the same desire to create a connection between Rome and the legendary past that makes the idea that Rome was founded by Lacedaemonians and its leaders, directly descended from the heroes of the Iliad culturally plausible if historically unlikely.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part 1)

"Capital of Justice"- caption reads, "Numa Pompilius, emperor, builder of temples and churches"

photo by Giovanni Dall'Orto, 2008

The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans: Numa Pompilius

Written by Plutarch sometime in the latter part of the 1st century CEPlace: Chaeronea in the province of Boeotia (Greece)

The complete text of Plutarch's biography of Numa Pompilius can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/numa_pom.html.
It utilizes the same Dryden translation used for this essay. Page numbers cited refer to the 2nd edition of the GB set.

Part One:

Plutarch’s biography of the early Roman king Numa Pompilius is marked by a very different tone than his elegiac account of Spartan law-giver Lycurgus though the two men are presumed by his writings to be contemporaries. There are a number of reasons for this differentiation still visible even from this distance. Lycurgus, remote as he was from Plutarch in time, made his impression upon Spartan culture in a place where the eventual organs of history were just beginning to develop. Though much of Plutarch’s writing on Lycurgus is informed by the same non-written culture to which every other historian of his time had access, he sews that narrative together with access to the written records from the Oracle at Delphi in a way that none other could.

Numa Pompilius, in contrast, was king in Rome at a time just after its inception as a city. Its culture was still a fractious one, split between its Roman and Sabine populations and each still ill at ease with the other. The most notable thing that can be said of Rome at this time is that they weren’t a colony of some more developed civilization to the East. In contrasting Lycurgus with Numa, Plutarch is subtly making the argument that their accomplishments were of equal importance and scope. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth as, even if we are able accept the historicity of his reforms listed here, Numa’s contributions to the greater human culture would take much longer to reach fruition and be diluted through many other ideas before arrival.

To appreciate why Plutarch presents Numa as such, one must recall who Plutarch is, a Hellenized Greek, and to whom he is writing, an audience of predominantly Roman readers in the time of first Caesars. The larger history he is writing, The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, is creating a story that persists unto this day: a two-part story that depicts the birth of civilization with the Greeks and then passes by means both natural and supernatural into the hands of the eager and industrious Romans; an Old and New Testament of knowledge and reason that trumpets the inevitability of those virtues winding up invested into the highest echelon of Roman authority.

Plutarch eludes to some of this historical slight-of-hand in his short section on methodology in the introduction.

Though the pedigrees of noble families in Rome go back in exact form as far as Numa Pompilius, yet there is great diversity among historians concerning the time in which he reigned; a certain writer named Clodius…avers that the ancient registers of Rome were lost when the city was sacked by the Gauls, and that those which are now extant were counterfeited, to flatter and serve the humour of some men who wished to have themselves derived from some ancient and noble lineage, though in reality with no claim to it. [49]

While making no claim to this position himself, it is with this patina of incredulity that he begins on his journey to reconcile the various histories about Numa with what little may be verified. He opens the story of Numa’s reluctant rise to power with a confusing account of how Romulus, the city’s founder, left the throne. During the performance of a ritual of the state, the sky darkened with a terrible storm and, in it, Romulus disappeared. Some presumed he had been murdered. Others suggested that he had be transfigured and brought to live among the gods, giving him a posthumous name, Quirinus to reflect this change. Whatever the truth of the circumstances, Rome now had a very big problem for it seems that Romulus left no mechanism for a smooth transition of power. For a period of time, known as the interregnum, the oligarchs of the Senate passed executive responsibilities around like a hot potato but the underlying tension between the Romans and the Sabines would not allow the throne to remain unfilled indefinitely.

They devise a scheme by which the Romans will select an Sabine and the Sabines, a Roman to select between for a ruler but, as we are able to infer later, no means can be found to choose between them that enjoys the legitimacy of Romulus’ reign. Then, the Romans nominate another Sabine, Numa Pompilius that gains the wide-spread acceptance of the Sabines. The first irony in his nomination is that Numa did not even live in Rome but had long since retired to the countryside to live in austerity after the death of his first wife. The second is that he appeared to have little to no interest in being king. Upon being solicited by the original candidates to rule over Rome, Numa is quoted by Plutarch as saying,

Every alteration of a man’s life is dangerous to him; but madness, only could induce one who needs nothing, and is satisfied with everything, to quit a life he is accustomed to; which, whatever else it is deficient in, at any rate has the advantage of certainty over one wholly doubtful and unknown…The very points of my characters that are most commended mark me as unfit to reign,--love of retirement and of studies inconsistent with business, a passion that has become inveterate in me for peace, for unwarlike occupations…I should, but be, methinks, a laughing-stock, which I should go inculcate the worship of the gods and give lessons in the love of justice and the abhorrence of violence and war, to a city whose needs are rather for a captain than for a king. [51]

Plutach also suggests that there may have been another reason for Numa’s unwillingness to leave his idyllic countryside. After the death of his wife, it was widely believed that Numa entered into some kind of physical relationship with the minor goddess, Egeria. It was from her that he was supposed to have gained divine wisdom regarding the rule of man. Plutarch goes to considerable lengths to show “historical” precedent for men enjoying the charms of the feminine divine just as so many Greek women had received visitation from a masculine one for aid in the conception of a hero or king, not knowing that that the first civilizations in Mesopotamia were founded on the idea of a male consort to a goddess dispensing wisdom among the people in how best to order their culture.