been first sundered during the Republic. But tradition[1] and survivals represent the king as the first priest in the community. His successor, the rex sacrorum, ranks, as a priest, above the three great flamines and the pontifex maximus in the order of the priesthood (ordo sacerdotum);[2] the religious duties of this rex point to the fact that the king's functions were a regular cultus, not the occasional religious duties of a Roman magistrate,[3] while his wife, the regina sacrorum, had her own simultaneous sacrifices.[4]
But the position of first priest did not in the Republic imply the headship of the Roman religion; the chief pontiff, who is its head, comes, as we saw, low in the order of the priesthood. The importance of cultus and of religious authority springing from higher knowledge are not the same. The pontiffs are only secondarily a priestly, primarily they are a religious order, whose position is based on the knowledge of religious law (fas). The separation between the true priesthood and the presidency of religion may, indeed, have been a Republican development, due to the secularisation of the magistracy; the priestly functions of the magistrate being continued in the rex sacrorum, and the religious presidency being also separated from the civil power, but vested in another official, the chief pontiff. But it is possible that the separation may have been primitive, and that cultus and the knowledge of religious law did not go together. It is evident that great uncertainty prevailed as to the king's relation to the pontifical college. While one account speaks of Numa selecting Numa Marcius as "the pontiff,"[5] another describes the same king as instituting five pontiffs,[6] and we are further told that, before the lex Ogulnia (300 B.C.), the college consisted of four members.[7] The discrepancy between the two last accounts has
- ↑ Dionys. ii. 14; iv. 74; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 15.
- ↑ Festus p. 185; Labeo ap. Gell. xv. 27; Ov. Fasti ii. 21.
- ↑ This is shown by his sacrifices on the Kalends and on the Nones (sacra nonalia) and his offering of a ram to Janus in the regia on the Agonalia (Jan. 9) (Festus p. 10; Varro L.L. vi. 12; Ov. Fasti i. 317).
- ↑ Festus p. 113; Macrob. i. 15, 19.
- ↑ Liv. i. 20 "Numa Pontificem . . . Numam Marcium M. f. ex patribus legit, eique sacra omnia exscripta exsignataque attribuit, quibus hostiis, quibus diebus, ad quae templa sacra fierent, atque unde in eos suraptus pecunia erogaretur. Cetera quoque omnia publica privataque sacra Pontificis scitis subjecit, ut esset, quo consultum plebes veniret: ne quid divini juris, negligendo patrios ritus, peregrinos que adsciscendo, turbaretur, etc." But afterwards (in 449 B.C.) Livy (iii. 54) implies the existence of a college, without mentioning its institution. Cf. iv. 44.
- ↑ Cic. de Rep. ii. 14, 26.
- ↑ Liv. x. 6.
