WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY
Compiled & Edited by Rob Chappell
(@RHCLambengolmo)
Vol. 3, No. 13: January 24, 2024
King Numa and His Calendar
Editor’s
Note
As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated
by calendars and their mysterious numerical intricacies. Since my sophomore
year as a Classical Philology major at the University of Illinois, I have also
been fascinated by an ancient Roman historical figure: Numa Pompilius, the
second King of Rome (reigned 715-673 BCE). In addition to keeping the peace for
39 of his 42 years on the throne, he also created many religious institutions
and orders of clergy, and – perhaps most importantly for future history – he
reformed the ancient Roman calendar, making January the first month of the year
(instead of beginning the year in March, as his predecessor, King Romulus, had
done).
So in honor of the New Year and the month of January,
here are some stories and poems about King Numa and his calendar, which is the
direct ancestor of our own!
Historical Overview
Excerpted from B. G. Niebuhr’s History of Rome.
Vol. 1, p. 237 ff. (1845)
On the death of Romulus, the Senate at first would
enjoy the royal power in rotation as interrex. In this way a year passed. The
people, being treated more oppressively than before, were vehement in demanding
the election of a sovereign to protect them. When the Senate permitted it to be
held, the Romans and Sabines disputed out of which nation the king should be
taken. It was agreed that the former should choose him out of the latter: and
all voices concurred in naming the wise and pious Numa Pompilius of Cures, who
had married the daughter of Tatius.
It was a very prevalent belief in antiquity that Numa
had derived his knowledge from the Greek Pythagoras; Polybius and other writers
attempted to show that this was impossible, for chronological reasons, inasmuch
as Pythagoras did not come into Italy till the reign of Servius Tullius; but an
impartial critic, who does not believe that the son of Mnesarchus was the only
Pythagoras, or that there is any kind of necessity for placing Numa in the
twentieth Olympiad, or, in fine, that the historical personality of Pythagoras
is more certain than that of Numa, will be pleased with the old popular
opinion, and will not sacrifice it to chronology.
When Numa was assured by the auguries that the gods
approved of his election, the first care of the pious king was turned, not to
the rites of the temples, but to human institutions. He divided the lands which
Romulus had conquered and had left open to occupancy. He founded the worship of
Terminus. It was not till after he had done this that Numa set himself to
legislate for religion. He was revered as the author of the Roman ceremonial
law. Instructed by the Camena Egeria, who was espoused to him in a visible
form, and who led him into the assemblies of her sisters in the sacred grove. He
regulated the whole hierarchy; the pontiffs, who took care, by precept and by
chastisement, that the laws relating to religion should be observed both by
individuals and by the state; the augurs, whose calling it was to afford
security for the councils of men by piercing into those of the gods; the
flamens, who ministered in the temples of the supreme deities; the chaste
virgins of Vesta; the Salii, who solemnized the worship of the gods with armed
dances and songs. He prescribed the rites according to which the people might
offer worship and prayer acceptable to the gods. To him were revealed the
conjurations for compelling Jupiter himself to make known his will, by
lightnings and the flight of birds: whereas others were forced to wait for
these prodigies from the favor of the god, who was often silent to such as were
doomed to destruction. This charm he learned from Faunus and Picus, whom, by
the advice of Egeria, he enticed and bound in chains, as Midas bound Silenus in
the rose garden. From this pious prince the god brooked such boldness. At
Numa's entreaty he exempted the people from the terrible duty of offering up
human sacrifices. But when the audacious Tullus presumed to imitate his
predecessor, he was killed by a flash of lightning during his conjurations in the
temple of Jupiter Elicius.
The 39 years of Numa's reign, which glided away in
quiet happiness, without any war or any calamity, afforded no legends but of
such marvels. That nothing might break the peace of his days, the ancile fell
from heaven, when the land was threatened with a pestilence, which disappeared
as soon as Numa ordained the ceremonies of the Salii. Numa was not a theme of
song, like Romulus; indeed he enjoined that, among all the Camenae, the highest
honors should be paid to Tacita. Yet a story was handed down, that, when he was
entertaining his guests, the plain foods in the earthenware dishes were turned
on the appearance of Egeria into a banquet fit for gods, in vessels of gold, in
order that her divinity might be made manifest to the incredulous. The temple
of Janus, his work, continued always shut: peace was spread over Italy; until
Numa, like the darlings of the gods in the golden age, fell asleep, full of
days. Egeria melted away in tears into a fountain.
The
future King Numa (at left) visits the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (at right)
in Croton, Italy. (Image Credit: Public Domain – 18th Century French
Painting)
Numa and Pythagoras
Excerpted from Book 15 of the Metamorphoses
By Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE)
English Translation by John Dryden (1631-1700)
A king is sought to guide the
growing state,
One able to support the
public weight
And fill the throne where
Romulus had sate.
Renown, which oft bespeaks
the public voice,
Had recommended Numa to their
choice:
A peaceful, pious prince; who
not content
To know the Sabine rites, his
study bent
To cultivate his mind; to
learn the laws
Of Nature, and explore their
hidden cause.
Urged by this care, his
country he forsook,
And to Crotona thence his
journey took.
* * *
Here dwelt the man divine,
whom Samos bore,
But now self-banished from
his native shore,
Because he hated tyrants, nor
could bear
The chains, which none but
servile souls will wear.
He, though from Heaven
remote, to Heaven could move,
With strength of mind, and tread
the abyss above;
And penetrate, with his
interior light,
Those upper depths, which
Nature hid from sight:
And what he had observed, and
learnt from thence,
Loved in familiar language to
dispense.
The crowd with silent
admiration stand,
And heard him, as they heard
their God's command;
While he discoursed of Heaven's
mysterious laws,
The world's original, and
Nature's cause;
And what was God; and why the
fleecy snows
In silence fell, and rattling
winds arose;
What shook the steadfast
Earth, and whence begun
The dance of planets round
the radiant sun;
If thunder was the voice of
angry Jove,
Or clouds, with niter
pregnant, burst above:
Of these, and things beyond
the common reach,
He spoke, and charmed his
audience with his speech.
* * *
These precepts by the Samian
sage were taught,
Which godlike Numa to the
Sabines brought,
And thence transferred to
Rome, by gift his own:
A willing people, and an
offered throne.
O happy monarch, sent by Heaven
to bless
A savage nation with soft
arts of peace,
To teach religion, rapine to
restrain,
Give laws to lust, and
sacrifice ordain:
Himself a saint, a goddess
was his bride,
And all the Muses over his
acts preside.
Advanced in years he died;
one common date
His reign concluded, and his
mortal state.
Pythagoreans Celebrate the Sunrise (1869) by Fyodor Bronnikov. (Image Credit:
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Life of Numa (Chapter 18)
By Plutarch (46-120 CE)
English Translation from the Loeb Classical
Library (1914 – Public Domain)
He applied
himself, also, to the adjustment of the calendar, not with exactness, and yet
not altogether without careful observation. For during the reign of Romulus,
they had been irrational and irregular in their fixing of the months, reckoning
some at less than twenty days, some at thirty-five,
and some at more; they had no idea of the inequality of the annual motions of
the Sun and Moon, but held to this principle only, that the year should consist
of three hundred and sixty days. But Numa, estimating the extent of the
inequality at eleven days, since the lunar year had three hundred and fifty-four days, but the solar year three hundred and sixty-five, doubled these eleven days, and every other year
inserted after the month of February the intercalary month called Mercedonius
by the Romans, which consisted of twenty-two days.
This correction of the inequality which he made was destined to require other
and greater corrections in the future.
He also
changed the order of the months. March, which had been first, he made the third
month, and January, which had been the eleventh month under Romulus, he made
the first month; February, which had been twelfth and last, thus became the
second month, as now. But there are many who say that these months of January
and February were added to the calendar by Numa, and that at the outset the
Romans had only ten months in their year, as some barbarians have three, and
as, among the Greeks, the Arcadians have four, and the Acarnanians six; the Egyptian
year had at first only a single month in it, afterwards four, as we are told.
And therefore, though they inhabit a very recent country, they have the
credit of being a very ancient people, and load their genealogies with a
prodigious number of years, since they really count their months as so many years.
The Conclusion of Plutarch’s Life of Numa
Numa lived
something above eighty years, and then, as Piso writes, was not taken out of
the world by a sudden or acute disease, but died of old age and by a gradual
and gentle decline. At his funeral all the glories of his life were
consummated, when all the neighboring states in alliance and amity with Rome
met to honor and grace the rites of his interment with garlands and public
presents; the senators carried the bier on which his corpse was laid, and the
priests followed and accompanied the solemn procession; while a general crowd,
in which women and children took part, followed with such cries and weeping as
if they had bewailed the death and loss of some most dear relation taken away
in the flower of age, and not an old and worn-out king. It is said that his
body, by his particular command, was not burnt, but that they made, in
conformity with his order, two stone coffins, and buried both under the hill
Janiculum, in one of which his body was laid, and the other his sacred books,
which, as the Greek legislators their tables, he had written out for himself,
but had so long inculcated the contents of them, whilst he lived, into the
minds and hearts of the priests, that their understandings became fully
possessed with the whole spirit and purpose of them; and he therefore bade that
they should be buried with his body, as though such holy precepts could not
without irreverence he left to circulate in mere lifeless writings. For this
very reason, they say, the Pythagoreans bade that their precepts should not be
committed to paper, but rather preserved in the living memories of those who
were worthy to receive them; and when some of their out-of-the-way and abstruse
geometrical processes had been divulged to an unworthy person, they said the
gods threatened to punish this wickedness and profanity by a signal and
wide-spreading calamity. With these several instances concurring to show a
similarity in the lives of Numa and Pythagoras, we may easily pardon those who
seek to establish the fact of a real acquaintance between them.
Valerius
Antias writes that the books which were buried in the aforesaid chest or coffin
of stone were twelve volumes of holy writ and twelve others of Greek
philosophy, and that about four hundred years afterwards, when P. Cornelius and
M. Bæbius were consuls, in a time of heavy rains, a violent torrent washed away
the earth, and dislodged the chests of stone; and, their covers falling off,
one of them was found wholly empty, without the least relic of any human body;
in the other were the books before mentioned, which the prætor Petilius having
read and perused, made oath in the senate, that, in his opinion, it was not fit
for their contents to be made public to the people; whereupon the volumes were
all carried to the Comitium, and there burnt.
It is the
fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their deaths,
and that the envy which evil men conceive against them never outlives them
long; some have the happiness even to see it die before them; but in Numa's
case, also, the fortunes of the succeeding kings served as foils to set off the
brightness of his reputation. For after him there were five kings, the last of
whom ended his old age in banishment, being deposed from his crown; of the
other four, three were assassinated and murdered by treason; the other, who was
Tullus Hostilius, that immediately succeeded Numa, derided his virtues, and
especially his devotion to religious worship, as a cowardly and mean-spirited
occupation, and diverted the minds of the people to war; but was checked in
these youthful insolences, and was himself driven by an acute and tormenting
disease into superstitions wholly different from Numa's piety, and left others
also to participate in these terrors when he died by the stroke of a
thunderbolt.
“Thirty Days Hath September”
(Anonymous – Traditional Rhyme of Lore)
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February at twenty-eight,
But leap year, coming once in four,
February then has one day more.
“The Months”
By Sara Coleridge (1802-1852)
January brings the snow,
Makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil.
April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daises at our feet.
May brings flocks of pretty lambs,
Skipping by their fleecy dams.
June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hand with posies.
Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers.
August brings the sheaves of corn,
Then the harvest home is borne.
Warm September brings the fruit,
Sportsmen then begin to shoot.
Fresh October brings the pheasants,
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.
Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.
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