The regal period, however, did more than simply replay the issues that Romulus raised. To follow the logic of the story, by the end of Romulus’ rule, Rome was still only half formed. Each of the successors made his own distinctive contribution, so ensuring that when the monarchy eventually fell, Rome was equipped with most of the characteristic institutions that made it Roman. Numa Pompilius and Servius Tullius were given the credit for the most significant of these. Servius Tullius is supposed to have devised the method of counting and rank-ordering the Roman people known as the census. This lay at the heart of ancient Rome’s political process for centuries, enshrining in it a fundamental hierarchical principle: that the rich had by right more power than the poor. But before him, Numa is said to have established, more or less single-handedly, the structure of official Roman religion, and religious institutions that left their mark, and their names, well beyond the limits of this book. In fact, the official title of the Catholic popes even now – pontifex, or ‘pontiff’ – derives or was borrowed from the title of one of the priesthoods supposedly founded by Numa.
Looking back over their city’s rise to dominance in the Mediterranean and beyond, later Romans attributed their extraordinary success not merely to military prowess. They had triumphed, they reasoned, because they had the gods on their side: their pious devotion to religion guaranteed their success. And, to reverse the axiom, any failure they encountered could be put down to some fault in their dealings with the gods: perhaps they had ignored bad omens, wrongly conducted a key ritual or run roughshod over religious rules. Their piety became a boast in their dealings with the outside world. At the beginning of the second century BCE, for example, when one Roman official wrote to the Greek town of Teos, on the western coast of modern Turkey, guaranteeing the Teans’ political independence (in the short term, at least), he rammed that message home. We can still read his somewhat pompous words, inscribed on a block of marble that was displayed in the town: ‘The fact that we Romans have, absolutely and consistently, judged reverence towards the gods as of first importance is proved by the favour we have received from them on this account. In addition, we are quite certain for many other reasons that our high respect for the divine has been evident to everybody.’ Religion, in other words, underwrote Roman power.
There are a few glimpses of this in the story of Romulus. As well as dedicating the Temple of Jupiter Stator, he consulted the gods in deciding where exactly to found the new city: it was partly a disagreement about how to interpret the divine signs, observed in the flight of some birds, that led to the fatal quarrel between Romulus and Remus. But it was his successor, the peace-loving Numa, who was given the role of ‘the founder of Roman religion’.
This did not make Numa a holy figure along the lines of Moses, the Buddha, Jesus or Muhammad. The traditional religion of Rome was significantly different from religion as we usually understand it now. So much modern religious vocabulary – including the word ‘religion’, as well as ‘pontiff’ – is borrowed from Latin that it tends to obscure some of the major differences between ancient Roman religion and our own. In Rome there was no doctrine as such, no holy book and hardly even what we would call a belief system. Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions. Nor was ancient Roman religion particularly concerned with personal salvation or morality. Instead it mainly focused on the performance of rituals that were intended to keep the relationship between Rome and the gods in good order, and so ensure Roman success and prosperity. The sacrifice of animals was a central element in most of these rituals, which otherwise were extraordinarily varied. Some were so outlandish that they undermine better than anything else the modern stereotype of the Romans as stuffy and sedate: at the festival of Lupercalia in February, for example, naked young men ran round the city whipping any women they met (this is the festival that the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar re-creates). In general, it was a religion of doing, not believing.
In line with this, Numa’s foundation had two different but related aspects. On the one hand, he established a series of priesthoods to perform or oversee major rituals, including, among an otherwise overwhelmingly male line-up, the Vestal Virgins, with their duty to keep the flame alight on the city’s sacred hearth in the Forum. On the other hand, he devised a calendar of twelve months, which provided the framework for the annual roster of festivals, holy days and holidays. A crucial aspect of any organised community is its ability to structure time, and in Rome it was Numa who was given the credit for inventing that structure. What is more, notwithstanding all kinds of later innovations and refinements, the modern Western calendar remains a direct descendant of this early Roman version, as the names we give to our months show: every single one of them is Roman. Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked. It is a surprising link between that early regal period and our world.
17. The head of a statue of a Vestal Virgin, from the second century CE, recognisable by her distinctive headdress. The Vestals were one of the very few groups of female priests of Roman public religion. They were also one of the very few full-time groups of religious officials, living ‘on the job’ in a house next to the temple of the goddess Vesta, with its sacred hearth, in the Forum. They were bound to chastity on pain of death.
Whether or not anyone called Numa Pompilius ever existed is impossible to know; still less whether he did any of the things ascribed to him. Roman scholars discussed his career intensely, accepting some aspects of the tradition about him but firmly rejecting others. He could not possibly, for example, have been the pupil of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, as one popular and tenacious story went; for, they argued, on any plausible chronology Pythagoras lived more than a century after Numa (or, as we now reckon, in the sixth rather than the seventh century BCE). But no matter how legendary or, at best, shadowy Numa was, one thing seems certain: some form of the calendar ascribed to him is the product of an early period in Rome’s history.
In fact, the earliest written version of a Roman calendar that we have – although itself from no earlier than the first century BCE – points strongly in that direction. It is an extraordinary survival, found painted on a wall in the town of Antium (modern Anzio), some 35 miles south of Rome, and offers a vivid, if slightly perplexing, glimpse of how Romans of Cicero’s time pictured their year. Nothing in early Rome would have been as complex as this. There are signs of all kinds of developments over the centuries, including some radical changes in the ordering of months and in the starting point of the year – for how else could November and December, meaning literally ‘ninth month’ and ‘tenth month’, respectively, have ended up in this calendar, and our own, as the eleventh and twelfth months in the sequence? But there are also hints of an ancient pedigree in this first-century BCE version.
Its system is basically one of twelve lunar months, with an extra month (the distant precursor of our extra day in a leap year) inserted from time to time to keep this calendar in proper alignment with the solar year. The biggest challenge facing primitive calendars everywhere is the fact that the two most obvious, natural systems of timekeeping are incompatible: that is to say, twelve lunar months, from new moon to new moon, add up to just over 354 days; and this cannot be made to match in any convenient way the 365¼ days of the solar year, which is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete circuit of the sun, from spring equinox to spring equinox, for instance. The wholesale insertion of an extra month every few years is just the kind of rough-and-ready method typical of early attempts to solve the problem.