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Updated: June 28, 2025
The practical gain which accrued to the Roman community from their religion was a code of moral law gradually developed by the priests, and the -Pontifices- in particular, which on the one hand supplied the place of police regulations at a time when the state was still far from providing any direct police-guardianship for its citizens, and on the other hand brought to the bar of the gods and visited with divine penalties the breach of moral obligations.
The gods confronted man just as a creditor confronted his debtor; each of them had a duly acquired right to certain performances and payments; and as the number of the gods was as great as the number of the incidents in earthly life, and the neglect or wrong performance of the worship of each god revenged itself in the corresponding incident, it was a laborious and difficult task even to gain a knowledge of a man's religious obligations, and the priests who were skilled in the law of divine things and pointed out its requirements the -Pontifices- could not fail to attain an extraordinary influence.
Portents, prophecies, soothsayings, frightful aspects in the sacrifices, natural growths of alarm and excitement, were equally vain. "Am I to be frightened," he said, in answer to some report of the haruspices, "because a sheep is without a heart?" The Pontifices, it was whispered, intended to bring on again the question of the kingship before Caesar's departure. The occasion would be appropriate.
The municipal funds were managed by two quaestors. Religious functions primarily devolved on the two colleges of men of priestly lore alone known to the earliest Latin constitution, the municipal pontifices and augurs. Relation of the -Municipium- to the State
It is of the very nature of a chronicle that it should attach prehistoric speculation to history and endeavour to go back, if not to the origin of heaven and earth, at least to the origin of the community; and there is express testimony that the table of the pontifices specified the year of the foundation of Rome.
These endowments particularly after they came to be regarded by the supreme spiritual and at the same time the supreme juristic authority in the state, the pontifices, as a real burden devolving -de jure- on every heir or other person acquiring the estate began to form an extremely oppressive charge on property; "inheritance without sacrificial obligation" was a proverbial saying among the Romans somewhat similar to our "rose without a thorn."
In the first place, they are not a caste apart: though there were restrictions as to the holding of secular magistracies in combination with the priesthood always observed strictly in the case of the rex sacrorum and with few exceptions in the case of the greater flamines yet the pontifices might always take their part in public life, and no kind of barrier existed between them and the rest of the community: Iulius Cæsar himself was pontifex maximus.
But all this can be so easily disputed that it is not worth while to pursue it farther or to put any trust in it. IX. To Numa also is referred the institution of the Pontifices, or high priests; and he himself is said to have been one of the first.
Subsequently it was the state officials who were learned in measuring and in writing, or in other words, the pontifices, that kept an official record of the names of the annual chief magistrates, and thus combined an annual, with the earlier monthly, calendar. Both these calendars were afterwards comprehended under the name of Fasti which strictly belonged only to the list of court-days.
The portions formed of peperino blocks, which are bound with iron clamps, have only been added in connection with subsequent labours of repair. 20. -Ratio Tuscanica,: cavum aedium Tuscanicum. Augustin. De Civ. Dei, iv. 31; comp. Comp, above, XIV. Development of Alphabets in Italy. I. XIII. Handicrafts I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods I. XII. Pontifices
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