bles;
and by those laws which we still preserve on our monuments he
mitigated, by religious ceremonials, the minds that had been too long
inflamed by military enthusiasm and enterprise.

He also established the Flamines and the Salian priests and the Vestal
Virgins, and regulated all departments of our ecclesiastical policy
with the most pious care. In the ordinance of sacrifices, he wished
that the ceremonial should be very arduous and the expenditure very
light. He thus appointed many observances, whose knowledge is extremely
important, and whose expense far from burdensome. Thus in religious
worship he added devotion and removed costliness. He was also the first
to introduce markets, games, and the other usual methods of assembling
and uniting men. By these establishments, he inclined to benevolence
and amiability spirits whom the passion for war had rendered savage and
ferocious. Having thus reigned in the greatest peace and concord
thirty-nine years--for in dates we mainly follow our Polybius, than
whom no one ever gave more attention to the investigation of the
history of the times--he departed this life, having corroborated the
two grand principles of political stability, religion and clemency.

XV. When Scipio had concluded these remarks, Is it not, said Manilius,
a true tradition which is current, that our king Numa was a disciple of
Pythagoras himself, or that at least he was a Pythagorean in his
doctrines? For I have often heard this from my elders, and we know that
it is the popular opinion; but it does not seem to be clearly proved by
the testimony of our public annals.

Then Scipio replied: The supposition is false, my Manilius; it is not
merely a fiction, but a ridiculous and bungling one too; and we should
not tolerate those statements, even in fiction, relating to facts which
not only did not happen, but which never could have happened. For it
was not till the fourth year of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus that
Pythagoras is ascertained to have come to Sybaris, Crotona, and this
part of Italy. And the sixty-second Olympiad is the common date of the
elevation of Tarquin to the throne, and of the arrival of Pythagoras.
From which it appears, when we calculate the duration of the reigns of
the kings, that about one hundred and forty years must have elapsed
after the death of Numa before Pythagoras first arrived in Italy. And
this fact, in the minds of men who have carefully studied the annals of
time,