Numa and Egeria

Summary

Numa is the second king of Rome in the Romans' accounts, after Romulus, and Egeria is the spring nymph who, he said, met him at night and advised him. He was a Sabine from the town of Cures, known for justice, piety and learning in law. Titus Tatius, Romulus's partner in the kingship, gave him his daughter Tatia; when she died thirteen years later he left the towns and lived alone in sacred groves and meadows, and from this grew the story that Egeria loved him and became his wife and teacher.

When Romulus vanished, the Romans chose him king. An augur led him to the citadel, seated him on a stone facing south, laid a hand on his head and prayed Jupiter to send signs if he approved; the signs appeared and he was proclaimed. Numa judged that a city founded by arms needed a second foundation of laws and rites, and that its people would not grow gentle until they feared the gods, so he said that he met Egeria by night and that the rites and priests he set up were her counsel. Livy says he claimed this to put the fear of the gods into people's hearts. He built the temple of Janus, open in war and shut in peace; divided the year into twelve months by the moon's course and added intercalary months; gave each god a priest; gave Vesta her virgins; chose for Mars twelve Salii who carried the heavenly shields round the city, dancing and singing; and set up on the Aventine an altar to Jupiter "the one drawn down". There was a grove with a never-failing spring that flowed out of a dark cave; he would withdraw there without witnesses as if to meet the goddess, dedicated the grove to the Camenae, the spring nymphs, and said they met there with his wife Egeria. He reigned forty-three years and fought no war.

Ovid's Fasti tells how the shield came. Jupiter rained lightning on Rome as never before, king and people were afraid, and Egeria told him: the thunderbolt can be expiated, but only Picus and Faunus can teach you how, and they will teach only under compulsion, so catch them and bind them. Numa set bowls of wine at a spring under the Aventine where they used to drink and hid in a cave; they drank until they slept, and he bound them. When they woke they taught him how to draw Jupiter down from the sky, and Jupiter came down until the treetops shook. He demanded as expiation "a head"; Numa said: an onion's, from my garden; Jupiter said: a man's; Numa said: his hair; Jupiter asked for a life, and Numa said: a fish's. Jupiter laughed, accepted, and promised a pledge of empire when the next day's sun rose. The people gathered at the king's door; as the sun came up the sky thundered three times from a cloudless sky, opened, and a shield came down swaying in the breeze. Numa sacrificed a heifer that had never borne the yoke, lifted the shield and called it ancile, because it was cut away on every side and had no angle. Knowing that the fate of the state hung on it, he had many shields made like it to deceive a thief's eye; the smith Mamurius made them and asked one reward: that his name be sung at the end of the Salian hymn, and the priests still sing it. Fasti 3.259–392. Plutarch says the shield fell in the eighth year of his reign, when a plague was crossing Italy; that Mamurius made eleven like it which Numa himself could not tell apart; and that Numa gave the water of the spring where it fell to the Vestal virgins to purify their temple every day.

Numa died an old man and was not burned; he was buried under the Janiculum in a stone coffin, and in a second coffin beside it were buried the sacred books he had written with his own hand. Egeria wept until she melted at the foot of a hill in the grove of Diana at Aricia, and Diana in pity turned her body into a running spring.

The idea the story turns on is that law comes from a hidden place by the water and one man carries it to the people. Numa neither conquers nor fights; he withdraws at night to the spring and comes back with a calendar, priests and rites, and when the people need proof a shield comes down from the sky before their eyes, to be seen and handled. The proof is then kept by repetition: one heavenly shield among eleven like it, carried by the Salii every March, with the maker's name in their hymn. The Roman rereading essay in this project reads the twelve shields as the months of the year and the procession of Mars as a calendar of war and farming together, a reading that meets Livy's report that Numa himself divided the year into twelve months.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Numa is a Latin name of the first declension, whose -a is the case ending, leaving Num-. The Roman essay in this project reads it from namma and gives it the sense of growth and ordering, with nuʿm, favour, beside it. In the dictionaries namma and namā meet in carrying speech from one person to another: Lane gives namma al-ḥadītha, he made a story known and passed it on to stir up trouble, and the Lisān quotes al-Aṣmaʿī that namaytu ḥadītha fulān ilā fulān is to convey someone's words to another in good faith, its root sense being to raise, and namaytu al-ḥadītha ilā fulān is to raise a report to someone and ascribe it to him. That is just what Numa did: he raised his laws to Egeria and ascribed them to her, and conveyed to the people what was said to him in private. The same root gives namā, to grow and increase, the essay's sense, and Rome lived forty-three years under him without war. Lane, n-m-m, Lisān and Muḥkam, n-m-y. Egeria we read, proposed on the method, from ajrā, to make water run, as in ajrā damʿahu, he shed his tears: she supplies the spring's water, then weeps until she becomes a running spring.

Linguistic Root

Lewis and Short give no origin for Numa and treat it as a Roman personal name, listing a second man of the name, Numa Marcius, the chief priest to whom the king handed the written rites. So the name was a Sabine personal name, its final -a is the case ending, and the reading covers Num- alone: n is n and m is m. The doubled m of namma or the weak final letter of namā leaves no extra consonant in Latin. The essay's second reading, nuʿm, needs the ʿ to drop, which the method's tables allow in Latin (ʿ is lost or becomes a vowel), but its sense, favour and good things, is too general to belong to Numa's story in particular.

Lane's n-m-m also gives munamnam, a garment figured with marks like writing, namānim, the sutures of the skull, "as resembling lines of writing", and namīmah, the sound of a bowstring. What joins them is a fine line that brings out what was hidden. Numa in the accounts is a man of books: he hands the chief priest the rites in writing and is buried with his books.

Ēgeria ends in the suffix -ia, which forms women's names and adjectives, leaving Ēger-. We read it as ajrā: the hamza of the causative form answers the long vowel at the start, Latin g answers Arabic j as j answers g in Proto-Semitic, r is r, and the weak final letter of the verb leaves no consonant. Lane gives jarā al-māʾ, the water ran or flowed, ajrāhu, he made it run, and ajrā damʿahu, he shed his tears. These are Egeria's acts in the texts: Ovid says she is the one who supplies the water of the Camenae's spring, Livy mentions the spring flowing from the cave in her grove, Plutarch makes the water of the spring where the shield fell the purification of Vesta's temple, and then she weeps until she becomes running water. Latin has a verb that looks like the name, ēgerere, to carry out, bring forth, whose r was s in older Latin according to de Vaan, so if the name came from it the r would not be original. The dictionary does not derive the name from that verb, and the question stays open.

As for ancile, Ovid explains it from cutting, because the shield is cut away on every side; Varro takes it as "cut on both sides"; and de Vaan derives it from "around" and "cut" together, ambi- + caed-, which is the ancient explanation itself. Lewis and Short prefer the Greek ἀγκύλος, crooked or curved.

Key Mythic Narratives

Numa and Pythagoras

Some ancient writers said Numa was taught by Pythagoras. Livy answers that Pythagoras lived more than a hundred years later in the south of Italy, and shared no language with the Sabines. Plutarch notes the likeness of Numa's rites to Pythagorean teaching: he forbade any image of the god in the form of a man or beast, and taught the Romans to honour above the other Muses one he called Tacita, the silent one.

Picus and Faunus in Plutarch

Plutarch makes Picus and Faunus two demigods who haunted the Aventine before it was settled and used drugs and spells. Numa caught them by mixing wine and honey into their spring; they turned into many fearful shapes, and when they saw they could not escape they foretold him things to come and taught him the expiation for lightning. The word "sprats" with which Numa closed his bargain had been taught him by Egeria.

The dance of the Salii

The Salii carry the shield through the streets of Rome in March, in purple tunics, broad bronze belts and bronze helmets, striking the shields with small daggers as they dance. Plutarch says their name comes from the leaping in their dance, and that some say their hymn does not name Mamurius Veturius but sings "ancient memory", veterem memoriam, words that sound like his name.

Symbolic Reading

Livy says the two successive kings served the nation in two different ways, one by war and the other by peace. Romulus cuts the wall and gathers people by force; Numa gives that gathering a divided time, priests and rites so that it can live without war. The Roman rereading essay makes Mars himself the power of spring that opens the earth with plough or sword, and the twelve shields the months of the year, so that the Salian procession in March, the first month of the old Roman year, counts the months with weapons. The story supports this: the shield came down as a pledge of rule, and the expiation Numa bargained over was for lightning, what comes from the sky upon crops and people.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Plutarch places Numa among lawgivers whom, he says, the deity addressed: Zaleucus, Minos, Zoroaster, Numa and Lycurgus, and gives the other view, that they claimed this so that people would obey. Diodorus of Sicily lists the same company: the Egyptians say Mneves had his laws from Hermes; the Greeks say Minos had his in Crete from Zeus and Lycurgus his from Apollo; among the Arians Zathraustes said the Good Spirit gave him his laws; and among the Jews Moses referred his to the god invoked as Iao. For the ancient historians Numa's story is one of many in which one man receives the law from a higher source and hands it to his people.

Older than all of these is Hammurabi on his monument: the king stands before Shamash seated on his throne and receives from him the insignia of rule, and the text of the laws says the gods called him to establish justice in the land. The difference is that Hammurabi writes his laws on stone before the people, while Numa is buried with his books.

In the cave of Dicte on Crete, as Apollodorus tells, the Curetes in arms clashed their spears on their shields around the infant Zeus so that Cronus would not hear him cry. This is close to what the Salii do when they strike their shields with daggers as they dance, though the Curetes' clashing hides a child, while the Salii's keeps a heavenly shield and announces the start of the year.

The Roman Semitic essay compares Numa with the Egyptian Thoth, scribe of the gods, to whom laws and books are ascribed. Numa's story also belongs with the culture heroes who give people a calendar and rites, and with the union of a king and a being not human that Plutarch calls "a celestial marriage", as in sacred marriage.

The augur who reads the birds for Numa has counterparts among the peoples: the Sumerian Gudea examines a kid's liver before building his temple, the Etruscans read the liver by the lore of Tages, and the Arabs cast the divining arrows before Hubal, as told under oracles and divination.

In China King Yao refuses to give the throne to his son and chooses a poor commoner, Shun, for his justice and filial devotion, and Mencius says Heaven gave him the throne when the spirits accepted his offerings and the people were content with him, as Numa is chosen from outside Rome and then accepted by the gods through the sign of the birds; see Yao and Shun.