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.

But there are also the likes of Jérôme Carcopino and other distinguished historians of ancient Rome who believe the books were burnt as an initiative of the more eastern-like adherents of the Pythagorean sect that had by now swirled through Italy. Rome had changes by now; it had become unrecognizably “Greek”.