Numa

This was the chief reason why Numa’s wisdom and culture were said to have been due to his intimacy with Pythagoras; for in the philosophy of the one, and in the civil polity of the other, religious services and occupations have a large place. It is said also that the solemnity of his outward demeanour was adopted by him because he shared the feelings of Pythagoras about it.

That philosopher, indeed, is thought to have tamed an eagle, which he stopped by certain cries of his, and brought down from his lofty flight; also to have disclosed his golden thigh as he passed through the assembled throngs at Olympia. And we have reports of other devices and performances of his which savoured of the marvellous, regarding which Timon the Phliasian wrote:—

1. Down to a juggler’s level he sinks with his cheating devices,
2. Laying his nets for men, Pythagoras, lover of bombast.

In like manner Numa’s fiction was the love which a certain goddess or mountain nymph bore him, arid her secret meetings with him, as already mentioned,[*](Chapter iv. 1-2.) and his familiar converse with the Muses. For he ascribed the greater part of his oracular teachings to the Muses, and he taught the Romans to pay especial honours to one Muse in particular, whom he called Tacita, that is, the silent, or speechless one; thereby perhaps handing on and honouring the Pythagorean precept of silence.

Furthermore, his ordinances concerning images are altogether in harmony with the doctrines of Pythagoras. For that philosopher maintained that the first principle of being was beyond sense or feeling, was invisible and uncreated, and discernible only by the mind. And in like manner Numa forbade the Romans to revere an image of God which had the form of man or beast. Nor was there among them in this earlier time any painted or graven likeness of Deity,