Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West

Abstract

From the end of the Roman Republic to the French Revolution Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome, was a recurrent figure in writing about religion and the social order. In the first century B.C.E. he was celebrated for using religion to civilize the early Romans and became a symbol of the gods' favor to the Roman state. Latin Church fathers subsequently denigrated him as the personification of the socioreligious system they were bent on overthrowing. After the triumph of Christianity his legacy ceased to be of concern, and in due course humanist intellectuals began to make him an object of admiration again. From the Renaissance on he exemplified the effective use of religion to mold nations. Although a number of texts that deal with Numa have received scholarly scrutiny, the trajectory of his literary afterlife has never been traced. This amounts to a prehistory of the modern idea of civil religion—an idea that, for all its familiarity, has remained ill defined and of uncertain provenance.