been reconciled by supposing that the king himself was reckoned as a member of the college, and that the expulsion of the king reduced the number from five to four.[1] It is possible that the king did not bear the title pontifex maximus and was yet head of the college; it is even possible that, as one account which we have quoted seems to indicate,[2] there was a chief pontiff as his delegate. We can hardly refuse him a place at this board in face of the evidences which point to his universal headship of religion. The creation of the augurate and the priesthoods is his work. Romulus appoints the augurs;[3] Numa institutes the three great Flamines, the Salii, and the Pontifex, although most of the important ceremonies of religion are performed by himself personally.[4] Consequently we may conclude that the appointment of special individuals to these priesthoods must have been a part of the king's office.[5] It has even been held (chiefly as an inference from the fact that the Vestals and Flamens were in the potestas of the pontifex maximus of the Republic) that the former were the king's unmarried daughters who attended to the sacred fire of the state in the king's house, the latter his sons whose duty it was to kindle the fire for the sacrificial worship of particular deities, Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. This pleasing picture may have represented the primitive state of the patriarchal kingship; but this had been long outgrown before the close of the monarchy. There we find a fully developed hierarchy and the existence of religious guilds, such as those of pontiffs and augurs, who cultivate the science, not the mere ritual of religion, and who have no possible connexion with the king's household arrangements.
At the head of this imposing organisation stands the rex, and, in virtue of this position, he is the chief expounder of the rules of divine law (fas). It is a law which has hardly any limits, running parallel with civil justice (jus) but far beyond its bounds. Three methods of its operation may conveniently be distinguished.
- ↑ Bouché-Leclerq Les Pontifes de l'ancienne Rome p. 9. That the king was pontiff is stated by Plutarch (Numa 9), Servius (ad Aen. iii. 81), and Zosimus (iv. 36), but the evidence may be vitiated by the position of the Princeps as pontifex maximus.
- ↑ Liv. i. 20 (p. 51 n. 5); cf. Ambrosch Studien p. 22.
- ↑ Cic. de Rep. ii. 9, 16; de Div. i. 2, 3.
- ↑ Liv. i. 20 "Tum sacerdotibus creandis animum adjecit, quamquam ipse plurima sacra obibat, ea maxime quae nunc ad Dialem flaminem pertinent."
- ↑ As, e.g., the nomination of Flamines belonged to the Latin dictator (Ascon. in Milon. p. 32).
