by Plutarch
About 400 years later, when Publius Cornelius and Marcus Baebius were consuls,145 there was a great storm during which a violent torrent washed away the earth, dislodging the coffins, the lids of which fell off. One could see that one coffin was entirely empty, without any trace of a corpse, but in the other one Numa’s books remained. The praetor Petilius146 is said to have read them, after which he brought them before the senate and declared that, in his opinion, it was counter to human and divine law for these texts to be shared with the public. Consequently, the books were taken to the Comitium147 and burned.
It is the fate of all good and just men to receive more praise after their deaths than when they are alive, for the envy they inspire does not long survive them, and sometimes even dies before they do. And, indeed, the misfortunes of the kings who succeeded Numa added lustre to his reputation. Of the five kings who came after him, the last one was overthrown and grew old in exile,148 and, of the remaining four,149 none died a natural death. Three were plotted against and murdered. As for Tullus Hostilius, who was the next to be king after Numa, he jeered at Numa’s noble qualities, especially his religious devotions, which, he claimed, left men lazy and effeminate. He turned his citizens to war instead. But not even he could persist in his childish insolence, for, when he was afflicted with a grave and intractable malady, he gave himself over to superstitions that were nothing like the seemly piety of Numa. In the end, he led the Romans to even more extreme forms of superstition, for, we are told, he perished when he was struck by lightning.
Comparison of Lycurgus and Numa
1 (23). Now that I have recounted the lives of Numa and Lycurgus, each of whom has been clearly depicted for the reader, I must not shrink from the task, however difficult it may prove, of collecting their differences. For it is unmistakable, from the evidence of their deeds, how much they have in common: their moderation, their piety, their talents as statesmen and teachers. And each of them predicated his legislation on a divine source.1 Still, each can boast noble achievements all his own. To begin with, Numa received but Lycurgus resigned a kingdom.2 One got his kingdom without asking for it, the other had his kingdom but gave it up. Although Numa was a private citizen and a foreigner, he was chosen by others to be their sovereign, whereas Lycurgus, who was a king, elected to become a private citizen. It is unquestionably a noble thing to acquire a kingdom because one is just, but it is also noble to hold justice in higher regard than a kingdom. It was virtue that made the one so illustrious that he was deemed worthy of a kingdom, just as it was virtue that made the other so great that he could despise a kingdom.
Let us turn to a second distinction. Just as a musician tunes his lyre by tightening or loosening its strings, so Lycurgus tightened the strings of a decadent Sparta, while for his part Numa loosened the strings of a Rome whose pitch was too high.3 Lycurgus’ task was harder to achieve. After all, he had to persuade his countrymen not to remove their breastplates and put down their swords, but instead to surrender their gold and silver and to cast away their expensive beds and tables, not to stop waging wars in order to celebrate festivals and make sacrifices but to leave off feasting and drinking in order to toil and train as soldiers and athletes. This is why Numa easily persuaded his people, owing to the favour and honour in which they held him, while Lycurgus suffered danger and actual wounds and even then barely managed to succeed.4
Numa’s muse, however, was civilized and humane, and he converted his people to peace and justice by calming their violent and ardent dispositions. Furthermore, if, in assessing Lycurgus, we must take into consideration the Spartans’ treatment of their helots,5 which is an extremely savage and lawless practice,6 we must then concede that, as a lawgiver, Numa – far more than Lycurgus – conformed to Greek ideals. For Numa allowed men who were slaves plain and simple to enjoy a taste of dignity and freedom by establishing the custom whereby slaves feast with their masters during the Saturnalia. This is recorded as one of Numa’s institutions, and it allows anyone who has contributed to producing a year’s fruits some share in their enjoyment. Others, however, turn to myth as an explanation of this custom and consider it a reminder of the equality that existed during the age of Saturn,7 when there was neither slave nor master and all men regarded one another as kinsmen and equals.
2 (24). In general, it is obvious how both Numa and Lycurgus led their peoples to self-sufficiency and temperance. Of the remaining virtues, one was more enamoured of valour, the other of justice – unless, by Zeus! it was the case that these two societies, which were characterized by different natures and habits, demanded different measures from their lawgivers. For Numa did not put a halt to the waging of war out of cowardice but rather to stop injustice. Nor did Lycurgus make the Spartans more belligerent in order to promote injustice but rather to stop them from suffering injustice at the hands of others. Both kings, then, in order to eliminate their citizens’ excesses and correct their deficiencies, were forced to introduce major reforms.
In so far as the division and classification of the citizenry is concerned, Numa’s arrangement was populist and favourable to the masses, for he made his people into a diffuse and variegated community of goldsmiths and musicians and shoemakers,8 whereas Lycurgus’ was strictly aristocratic: he considered crafts like these impure9 and assigned them to slaves and resident aliens, while he directed citizens to take up shields and spears and thereby become experts in the craft of warfare, servants of Ares10 whose only occupation lay in obedience to their commanders and in overpowering Sparta’s enemies. Lycurgus did not allow free men to engage in any profitable business, in order to keep them free in each and every respect. Consequently, all commerce was the responsibility of slaves and helots, a chore they carried out just as they looked after the preparation and serving of the citizens’ meals. No such distinction was made by Numa, who, although he curbed the soldiers’ rapacity, did nothing to prohibit other means of making money. Nor was he bothered by economic inequalities: the acquisition of wealth he left unrestricted, and he remained unconcerned as rising poverty crept into the city. And yet he had a moral duty from the very beginning – before disparities became deep and widespread and while most people shared more or less the same means – to put a stop to avarice. This is what Lycurgus did, and in this way he prevented the harm that avarice can cause, which has shown itself to be far from trifling and has in fact proved to be the origin and very seed of history’s most serious and devastating evils.
It is wrong, in my view, to find fault with Lycurgus for making a redistribution of land or with Numa for not doing so. In Lycurgus’ case, the equality gained by redistributing land was the very foundation of his state’s constitution,11 and, as for Numa, inasmuch as the land had recently been allocated, there was no pressing reason to make new allotments or for upsetting what was very likely the original assignment of the city’s land.12
3 (25). Lycurgus and Numa, each of them for sound and statesmanlike reasons, endorsed shared marriages and shared offspring, and with this in mind endeavoured to get rid of the jealousies that husbands naturally feel regarding their wives. However, they approached the matter in quite different ways. A Roman husband who had enough children might be persuaded by another man, who was in want of children, to relinquish his wife: the Roman might give her up entirely, or he might give her up but thereafter marry her once again.13 The Spartan, by contrast, although he would keep his wife in his home and his marriage would carry on as it always had, might nonetheless offer his wife to another man, if that man could persuade him to share her for the purpose of getting children. And there were many husbands, as I have already observed,14 who would invite and introduce into their homes such men as they thought likeliest to father handsome and brave sons. What, then, is the difference between these customs? Do we not see how the Spartan exhibits a complete and total indifference to his wife and to those emotions that disturb and anger most men by consuming them with jealousy, whereas, in the case of the Roman, his discretion lends a modest cover to the
reality of this arrangement, as if it were a wedding veil, all of which indicates that he finds sharing his wife difficult to do?
Furthermore, Numa was vigilant in his efforts to maintain the femininity and decorum of young girls,15 whereas they were not a bit restrained by Lycurgus, which was not merely unsuitable to their sex but provoked commentary from the poets.16 Ibycus referred to Spartan maidens as ‘thigh-flaunters’,17 and Euripides criticized them as man-crazy in lines like these:
Never at home, they are always with young men,
Their thighs are naked and their robes unfastened.18
In fact young girls in Sparta did wear tunics the sides of which were not sewn together below the waist, and so, when they walked, their tunics flew back and completely revealed their thighs. Sophocles depicts this vividly in the following lines:
And that young girl, whose still unsewn tunic
Falls round her exposed thigh, is Hermione.19
This is why Spartan wives were said to be too presumptuous, acting the part of men not least in the presence of their husbands, since they ruled their households like autocrats, and in public affairs they expressed their views – without inhibition – on the weightiest matters.
As for Numa, although he scrupulously preserved for married women the courtesies and respect from their husbands that had been prescribed by Romulus when he granted them honours as compensation for their abduction,20 he nevertheless insisted on their behaving with the utmost modesty: he forbade their meddling in other people’s business, taught them sobriety and trained them to keep silent.21 Thus they abstained from wine and from discussing important matters unless their husbands were present. It is in fact reported that when once a woman pleaded her own case in the forum,22 the senate sent envoys to an oracle to ask what this prodigy portended for the city. The most convincing proof of the obedience and mildness of Roman wives lies in the nature of our evidence for such women as were disagreeable. For just as our historians record for us the names of those men who were the first to murder a kinsman or to wage war against a brother or to slay a father or mother, so the Romans preserve the fact that Spurius Carvilius was the first man to divorce his wife, and he did this 230 years after the founding of Rome,23 when nothing of the like had ever before occurred. We also learn that Thalaea, the wife of Pinarius, was the first woman to quarrel with her mother-in-law,24 whose name was Gegania, and this took place in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus. This makes it clear how well and how suitably Roman marriages were regulated by their lawgiver.
4 (26). When it comes to the marriageability of young girls, the practices of the two peoples are consistent with methods they use in rearing their daughters. Lycurgus allowed them to marry only when they were mature enough to desire sexual relations, so that intercourse with their husbands, coinciding with their natural cravings, might be a source of affection and love instead of hatred and fear, which could result if they were forced to have sex before it was natural to them.25 He also wanted their bodies to be vigorous enough to be able to endure the strains of pregnancy and childbirth, for he believed that marriage served no other purpose than the production of children. By contrast, the Romans give their daughters in marriage at the age of twelve or even younger, the idea being that this would ensure that, when they married, they were pure in body and character.26 It is clear, then, how one approach is mostly concerned with the question of the girls’ physical development and is focused on the procreation of children, whereas the other gives greater consideration to the girls’ moral development, focusing on the quality of conjugal life.
However, in his careful attention to boys, by way of their organization into groups, their instruction and their communal upbringing, and in his exacting regulations for their meals and exercises and games,27 Lycurgus makes it clear how Numa was no better than any other lawgiver. For Numa left it up to their fathers to determine, according to their preferences or needs, how best to raise their sons.28 If he wished, a father might make his son a farmer or shipbuilder, or teach him to become a blacksmith or a flautist, as if the right thing to do were not to train them all for one purpose and to mould all their characters in the same way. Instead, Numa’s Romans grew up to be like passengers on a ship, each taking part in its voyage for very different reasons and therefore only coming together for the common good if a danger should arise (because everyone is afraid of suffering a private loss) but otherwise each looking only to his own interest. Granted it is pointless to find fault with most lawgivers who fail owing either to ignorance or incapacity, but, in the case of a man who is wise and has been chosen king by a people with no long-standing institutions and who can thus refuse him nothing, what priority could come before educating boys and training young men with the goal of eliminating disruptive differences in their characters, so that, shaped and moulded in one and the same virtue from the very beginning, they might remain in harmony? It was this system of education that, in addition to all its other advantages, helped to preserve the laws of Lycurgus. The Spartans’ oaths to abide by Lycurgus’ legislation would not really have counted for much had this system of educating and training the young not instilled his laws into their character by making the love of his constitution an element of their upbringing.29 As a consequence, for more than 500 years the principal and most important of his laws persisted unchanged, like the pigments of a strong and indelible dye. Although Numa’s constitution was designed to ensure that the Romans continued in peace and amity, all that ceased at the end of his reign. After his death, the two gates of the temple he had kept closed, as if he really kept war itself confined and imprisoned within, were opened, and the Romans filled Italy with blood and corpses.30 Not even for a brief time, then, did Numa’s institutions persist, although they were truly noble and just, and this came about because they lacked an adequate foundation in the education of the young.31
‘But wait,’ someone will say, ‘is it not true that Rome advanced to a better condition by way of her wars?’ That is a question that will require a long answer if one is speaking with men for whom what is better consists of riches, luxury and domination instead of security, mildness and independence tempered by justice.32 Nevertheless, even this objection seems to speak in Lycurgus’ favour, for it was only after they had given up Numa’s constitution that the Romans increased their power, whereas, in the case of the Lacedaemonians, no sooner did they abandon the regulations instituted by Lycurgus than they fell from the highest to the lowest condition, lost their domination of Greece and were in danger of being utterly destroyed.33
Still, there remains one great and truly divine dimension to Numa’s career, the fact that, although he was a foreigner, he was sent for to be king and proceeded to bring about major reforms strictly through persuasion, maintaining his mastery over a reluctant and demurring city without recourse to arms or violence – unlike Lycurgus, who led his nobles against the common people – but instead, Numa won over his citizens and brought them into harmony owing to his wisdom and justice.
PUBLICOLA
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Introduction to Publicola
The Civic Hero
Ideally, the Roman emperor was possessed of every talent essential for success in war and in peace. On campaign, his supreme command was grounded in his superior martial valour, whereas, in matters pertaining to the political administration of the empire or the society of his fellow-aristocrats, he should, for all his natural majesty, exhibit a welcoming and courteous degree of moderation and civility – an imperial virtue the Romans designated as civilitas. All emperors enjoyed unexcelled authority, but only base ones behaved like raw autocrats – and even the worst of Rome’s emperors shared with their subjects the opinion that tyranny was an abomination and a thing utterly un-Roman in its nature. Instead, so insisted imperial panegyrists and moralists alike, the good emperor was a figure who employed his might in ensuring the freedom and security – and the dignity – of his subjects, not least by way of his commitment to justice.1 It is from the perspectiv
e of this imperial ideology that we must read Plutarch’s Life of Publius Valerius Publicola.
Publicola was a founding father and a champion of the new republic established in 509 BC after the tyrannical king, Tarquinius Superbus, had been driven into exile. The significance of this event in Roman history cannot be overestimated, and the political and social values which the Romans associated with their republic persisted long after its constitution had been replaced by the rule of emperors.2 The republic, so the Romans believed, was marked by a wise and responsible leadership responsive to its public. The fall of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic – and its subsequent defence from the exiled Tarquinius and his Etruscan allies – were events that attracted the exploits of many legendary heroes. Tarquinius was overthrown in an aristocratic coup led by Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Spurius Lucretius, Marcus Horatius Pulvillus and Publius Valerius Publicola – all of them said to have been consuls in the first year of the republic, magisterial clutter that suffices to demonstrate the unreliability of Rome’s early historical narrative. Furthermore, the defence of the republic required the exertions of legendary figures like Mucius Scaevola, Horatius Cocles, even Cloelia, each of whom makes an appearance in this biography.
