Numa

All this was distributed by Numa among the indigent citizens. He wished to remove the destitution which drives men to wrongdoing, and to turn the people to agriculture, that they might be subdued and softened along with the soil they tilled. For there is no other occupation which produces so keen and quick a relish for peace as that of a farmer’s life, where so much of the warrior’s daring as prompts a man to fight for his own, is always preserved, while the warrior’s licence to indulge in rapacity and injustice is extirpated.

Numa, therefore, administering agriculture to his citizens as a sort of peace-potion, and well pleased with the art as fostering character rather than wealth, divided the city’s territory into districts, to which he gave the name of pagi, and in each of them he set overseers and patrols. But sometimes he would inspect them in person, and judging of the characters of the citizens from the condition of their farms, would advance some to positions of honour and trust; while others, who were indolent and careless, he would chide and reproach, and so try to make them sensible.

But of all his measures, the one most admired was his distribution of the people into groups according to their trades or arts. For the city was supposed to consist of two tribes, as has been said,[*](Chapter ii. 4 f.) although it had no consistency, but was rather divided into two tribes, and utterly refused to become united, or to blot out its diversities and differences. On the contrary, it was filled with ceaseless collisions and contentions between its component parts. Numa, therefore, aware that hard substances which will not readily mingle may be crushed and pulverized, and then more easily mix and mingle with each other-owing to the smallness of their particles,

determined to divide the entire body of the people into a greater number of divisions, and so, by merging it in other distinctions, to obliterate the original and great distinction, which would be lost among the lesser ones. He distributed them, accordingly, by arts and trades, into musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, leatherworkers, curriers, braziers, and potters. The remaining trades he grouped together, and made one body out of all who belonged to them.

He also appointed social gatherings and public assemblies and rites of worship befitting each body. And thus, at last, he banished from the city the practice of speaking and thinking of some citizens as Sabines, and of others as Romans; or of some as subjects of Tatius, and others of Romulus, so that his division resulted in a harmonious blending of them all together.

Praise is also given to that measure of his whereby the law permitting fathers to sell their sons was amended. He made an exception of married sons, provided they had married with the consent and approval of their fathers. For he thought it a hard thing that a woman who had married a man whom she thought free, should find herself living with a slave.

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 in 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 Mercedinus by the Romans, which consisted of twenty-two days.