Religion in ancient Rome, Part I: King Numa and Spartan spirituality reflecting Logos
Numa and the nymph Egeria |
Numa Pompilius was the second king of
Rome, right after Romulus, when Rome was yet nothing but a tribal village.
Pompilius is his family name; Numa was of Sabine origins. The Sabines and the
Romans had an agreement reminiscent to that of the two Theban brothers, which
meant Rome would be governed by a Roman king, then a Sabine one, and so on.
Numa ruled from 715–673 BC.
His story is quite reminiscent of the
biblical king David, but in pure Indo-European blood and fashion. He was the
youngest of his brothers (four in total) and practiced a life not coveted by
the masses. Like David tending to his cattle in the wilderness, Numa too lived
away from home in self-inflicted discipline and unnecessary luxury banned from
his dwelling. The legend also says that he was actually born in a cave. Like
David, he was reluctant to take up the call to be appointed king of Rome and
only agreed after consulted with wiser and older men. Plutarch adds that,
though the masses were exhilarant to have him as king, Numa went to an augur
(Roman priest and interpreter of signs/omens) to ask or Jupiter’s mind and
will. It was after this that he ascended on Rome’s throne.
According to Plutarch, Romulus had a permanent
personal guard of 300 men called Celeres in Latin (the Swift). This is the same
practice of Leonidas and other Spartan kings, as well as the number of fighters
mentioned to gather around the hero Muji in the Albanian Epos. (We will get back
to these Spartan details.) Numa, however, disbanded the guard, in what Plutarch
interprets as either a self-protection measure (since these specific Celeres
were Roman and could have loyalty to some other wanna-be king of Roman blood),
a sign of humility, or a signal that Rome was enjoying peace and moderation and
their services were not needed.
As a king, Numa was intent on making
the best use possible of the (rare) period of prolonged peace in Roman history
and establish the religious and social institutions that would for centuries
maintain the fabric of the distinguishable Roman way of life, spirituality and
morals. Like the hero Muji consulted with the supernatural Ora e Malit (the
mountain Norn), Numa got his erudition and Roman canonic law from the nymph
Egeria; Numa’s name itself derives from the Latin “numen”, which designates
“the expressed will of a deity”, or divine presence in a man. Livy writes he
consulted Egeria (“e gjerë”, as in “generous” in Albanian) every evening as to
the best ways to institute sacred rites, which resulted in teaching the people
of Rome to also know how to be gentle and not only belligerent when needed,
revering the gods, abiding the law, treating enemies with dignity (an
ever-present feature of the Indo-Europeans), and living worthy lives that
induced respect from others.
According to again Plutarch, Numa,
under Egeria’s support and preparation, had a battle of wits with the chief god
Jupiter, who then issued him a ritual against lightning strikes and thunders,
the same things he threw on earth. You see, it was not only Jacob who battled
with God. He cared for our folk in Europe too!
This article is meant to not be too
long, thus the numerous Roman institutions established by Numa will only be
mentioned as a summary: the priesthoods (the flamines, pontifices, Salii, and
fetiales), their rituals, the Pontifex Maximus (Highest Priest), the temple of
Janus (the two-faced god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality,
doorways, passages, and endings, whose temple closed during peace times and
opened in times of war), the cult of Terminus (god of boundaries), the Ancile
(the brass shield thrown by Jupiter from heaven during a plague season in Rome,
with Numa making another 11 identical to it so it could only be distinguished
by a few, if any), the Vestal virgins (young virgin women who served Vesta,
goddess of the hearth, for seven years, greatly honoured in Rome, and who could
marry at the end of their term, including the months January and February in a
calendar adjusted from both the solar and lunar ones, dividing Rome’s territory
into pagi (villages), establishing the traditional guilds of the city
(musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, etc.) all performing their tasks and
talents, etc.
Let us return now to what was
previously mentioned here as the Spartan details surrounding Numa. The Sabines
– and Numa was a Sabine – identified themselves as an Italic colony of the
Lacaedaemonians, who are the indigenous, non-Greek people of the region of
Laconia. We know them today as the Spartans, but Sparta was only one of the
cities in this larger area. The Lacaedaemonians then are of Dorian descent, and
the Dorians are Illyrian, not Pelasgian or any other kind of further
south-eastern Europeans. One of their totems, or spiritual symbols, was the
wolf, or “ujk” in Albanian. Again in Albanian, a pack of wolves is called
“lukuni”. Laconia sounds eerily similar to “lukuni”, with the natural evolution
of language in the millennia.
Plutarch notes something else very
Spartan, and, dare I say, extremely similar to Illyrian and even much later
Albanian approach to the divine:
Numa “forbade the Romans to represent the deity in the
form either of man or of beast. Nor was there among them formerly any image or
statue of the Divine Being; during the first one hundred and seventy years they
built temples, indeed, and other sacred domes, but placed in them no figure of
any kind; persuaded that it is impious to represent things Divine by what is
perishable, and that we can have no conception of God but by the understanding.”
You see, statues and paintings, like those of
ancient “Greece” and later Rome itself, or like those of Egypt and others, are
awe-inspiring indeed. But, more than that, they are the sign that a people has
parted so far from truly seeking the Creator’s face and worshiping Him in
nature, as intended in the Garden, that they are willing to satiate their
impure thirst with stamping the natural on the Divine.
Lastly, Numa kept all his knowledge
written down in books, which were divided into two main categories: the
religious ones (which included daily life and how the city should be run) written
in Latin, and the philosophy ones, written in “Greek”. Sadly, a long time after
Numa’s death, the books were burnt by new powers that deemed the knowledge
troubling to their status. Officially, the books were burnt by the victimarii (the priests strictly in charge
of slaughtering the animals intended for sacrifices to the gods) by order
Praetor Q. Petilius, in what is seen as a politically-motivated move, wanting
to keep the city at whatever state it was at that time.
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