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Updated: May 23, 2025
To you the sigh of Numa may sound no different from the other noises which the wind makes among the grasses and the trees; but later you must learn to know the sigh of Numa. Then I watched and at last I saw the tall grasses moving at one point to a force other than the force of the wind. See, they are spread there upon either side of Numa's great body, and as he breathes you see?
The people then chose Ancus Martins, the son of Numa's daughter, who is said to have ruled in his grandfather's spirit, though he could not avoid wars with the Latins. The first bridge over the Tiber, named the Sublician, was said to have been built by him. In his time there came to Rome a family called Tarquin.
At the same instant the ape-man dropped from an overhanging limb full upon the lion's back and as he alighted he plunged his knife into the tawny side behind the left shoulder, tangled the fingers of his right hand in the long mane, buried his teeth in Numa's neck and wound his powerful legs about the beast's torso.
There would be three goats for the initiation of the three youths into full-fledged warriorship, and besides these he had received several gifts of grain and beads, together with a piece of copper wire from admiring and terrified members of his audience. Numa's roar still reverberated along taut nerves when a woman's laugh, shrill and piercing, shattered the silence of the village.
And so, when the Republic is instituted, a special official, the rex sacrorum, inherits the king's ritual duties, while the superintendence of the Vestals passes to his representative in the matter of religious law, the pontifex maximus, whose official residence is always the regia, Numa's palace. The state is but the enlarged household and the head of the state is its religious representative.
When the smoke had dissipated, a heap of ruins stood in the place of Numa's dwelling. The sun rose and smiled upon the earth, which was strewed with the last leaves of autumn, but where were those who had assembled at the spring-time of the year? The evening breezes whispered mournfully through the ruined walls, and strewed the faded leaves upon eleven grassy mounds.
He heard Numa's baffled roar as the lion slipped downward clawing futilely at the leafy creepers, and then with the agility of the apes who had reared him, Tarzan bounded nimbly aloft to the summit of the wall.
Numa's reforms were all in favour of the people, whom he classified into a mixed and motley multitude of goldsmiths and musicians and cobblers; while the constitution introduced by Lykurgus was severely aristocratic, driving all handicrafts into the hands of slaves and foreigners, and confining the citizens to the use of the spear and shield, as men whose trade was war alone, and who knew nothing but how to obey their leaders and to conquer their enemies.
In Numa's estimation man was a slow-witted, slow-footed creature which commanded no respect unless accompanied by the acrid odor which spelled to the monarch's sensitive nostrils the great noise and the blinding flash of an express rifle. He caught the dangerous scent tonight; but he was ravenous to madness. He would face a dozen rifles, if necessary, to fill his empty belly.
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.
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