The Religion of Numa | Page 4

the growth of those gross myths which are
usually found among primitive peoples, for the purer more inspiring
myths of gods are not the primitive product but result from the process
of refining which accompanies a people's growth in culture. Thus the
theory of animism illumines the religious condition of that borderland
of history in which Romulus and Numa Pompilius have their
dwelling-place.
According to that pleasant fiction of which the ancient world was so
extremely fond--the belief that all institutions could be traced back to
their establishment by some individual--the religion of Rome was
supposed to have been founded by her second king Numa, and it was
the custom to refer to all that was most antique in the cult as forming a
part of the venerable "religion of Numa." For us this can be merely a
name, and even as a name misleading, for a part of the beliefs with
which we are dealing go back for centuries before Romulus and the
traditional B.C. 753 as the foundation of Rome. But it is a convenient
term if we mean by it merely the old kingdom before foreign influences
began to work. The Romans of a later time coined an excellent name
not so much for the period as for the kind of religion which existed then,
contrasting the original deities of Rome with the new foreign gods,
calling the former the "old indigenous gods" (Di Indigetes) and the
latter the "newly settled gods" (Di Novensides). For our knowledge of
the religion of this period we are not dependent upon a mere theory, no
matter how good it may be in itself, but we have the best sort of
contemporary evidence in addition, and it is to the discovery of this
evidence that the modern study of Roman religion virtually owes its
existence. The records of early political history were largely destroyed

in B.C. 390 when the Gauls sacked Rome, but the religious status, with
the conservativeness characteristic of religion generally, suffered very
few changes during all these years, and left a record of itself in the
annually recurring festivals of the Roman year, festivals which grew
into an instinctive function of the life of the common people. Many
centuries later when the calendar was engraved on stone, these revered
old festivals were inscribed on these stone calendars in peculiarly large
letters as distinguished from all the other items. Thus from the
fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and which
are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another eight
or ten centuries further. By the aid of this "calendar of Numa" we are
able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this time,
and the equally important absence of others. And from the character of
the deities present and of the festivals themselves a correct and more or
less detailed picture of the religious condition of the time may be drawn.
This calendar and the list of Indigetes extracted from it form the
foundation for all our study of the history of Roman religion.
The religious forms of a community are always so bound up with its
social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is
practically impossible without some knowledge of the other.
Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history where theories are so
abundant and facts so rare as in regard to the question of the early
social organisation. But without coming into conflict with any of the
rival theories we may make at least the following statements. In the
main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were
no great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that
each individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would
have found himself in four distinct relationships: a relationship to
himself as an individual; to his family; to the group of families which
formed his clan (gens); and finally to the state. We may go a step
further on safe ground and assert that the least important of these
relations was that to himself, and the most important that to his family.
The unit of early Roman social life was not the individual but the
family, and in the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family
which has immortality, not the individual. The state is not a union of
individuals but of families. The very psychological idea of the

individual seems to have taken centuries to develop, and to have
reached its real significance only under the empire. Of the four
elements therefore we have established the pre-eminence of the family
and the importance of the state as based on the family idea; the
individual may be disregarded in this early period, and there is left only
the clan, which however offers