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| Concerning the Books of Numa Pompilius, Which the Senate Ordered to Be Burned, in Order that the Causes of Sacred Rights Therein Assigned Should Not Become Known.
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Chapter 34.—Concerning the Books
of Numa Pompilius, Which the Senate Ordered to Be Burned, in Order
that the Causes of Sacred Rights Therein Assigned Should Not Become
Known.
But, on the other hand, we find, as
the same most learned man has related, that the causes of the
sacred rites which were given from the books of Numa Pompilius
could by no means be tolerated, and were considered unworthy, not
only to become known to the religious by being read, but even to
lie written in the darkness in which they had been concealed. For
now let me say what I promised in the third book of this work to
say in its proper place. For, as we read in the same Varro’s
book on the worship of the gods, “A certain one Terentius had a
field at the Janiculum, and once, when his ploughman was passing
the plough near to the tomb of Numa Pompilius, he turned up from
the ground the books of Numa, in which were written the causes of
the sacred institutions; which books he carried to the prætor,
who, having read the beginnings of them, referred to the senate
what seemed to be a matter of so much importance. And when the
chief senators had read certain of the causes why this or that rite
was instituted, the senate assented to the dead Numa, and the
conscript fathers, as though concerned for the interests of
religion, ordered the prætor to burn the books.”293
| 293 Plutarch’s Numa; Livy,
xl. 29. | Let each
one believe what he thinks; nay, let every champion of such impiety
say whatever mad contention may suggest. For my part, let it
suffice to suggest that the causes of those sacred things which
were written down by King Numa Pompilius, the institutor of the
Roman rites, ought never to have become known to people or senate,
or even to the priests themselves; and also that Numa
him
self attained to these secrets of demons by an illicit
curiosity, in order that he might write them down, so as to be
able, by reading, to be reminded of them. However, though he was
king, and had no cause to be afraid of any one, he neither dared to
teach them to any one, nor to destroy them by obliteration, or any
other form of destruction. Therefore, because he was unwilling
that any one should know them, lest men should be taught infamous
things, and because he was afraid to violate them, lest he should
enrage the demons against himself, he buried them in what he
thought a safe place, believing that a plough could not approach
his sepulchre. But the senate, fearing to condemn the religious
solemnities of their ancestors, and therefore compelled to assent
to Numa, were nevertheless so convinced that those books were
pernicious, that they did not order them to be buried again,
knowing that human curiosity would thereby be excited to seek with
far greater eagerness after the matter already divulged, but
ordered the scandalous relics to be destroyed with fire; because,
as they thought it was now a necessity to perform those sacred
rites, they judged that the error arising from ignorance of their
causes was more tolerable than the disturbance which the knowledge
of them would occasion the state.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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