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For an answer to the first question it is not safe to appeal to later examples, for the priesthood and the magistracy may have been first sundered during the Republic. But tradition[195] 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);[196] 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,[197] while his wife, the regina sacrorum, had her own simultaneous sacrifices.[198]

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,”[199] another describes the same king as instituting five pontiffs,[200] and we are further told that, before the lex Ogulnia (300 B.C.), the college consisted of four members.[201] The discrepancy between the two last accounts has 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.[202] 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,[203] 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;[204] Numa institutes the three great Flamines, the Salii, and the Pontifex, although most of the important ceremonies of religion are performed by himself personally.[205] Consequently we may conclude that the appointment of special individuals to these priesthoods must have been a part of the king’s office.[206] 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.