There was also a religious aspect of the king’s appointment. His assumption of power was regarded as incomplete until it had been shown that the gods sanctioned the rule which he had assumed. This was done by the first taking of the auspices[191]—a ceremony observed by magistrates of the Republic before entering on the exercise of their office. This was the final test for the right to exercise secular power; but the king’s position as high-priest of the community was supposed to require another initiatory act. This was the inauguration, which differed from the taking of the auspices. In the ordinary form of the _auspicia_ the individual entering on office has himself the right of _spectio_;[192] in the Republic it belonged to magistrates as such, and was never regarded as a merely priestly function. In the special inauguration, on the contrary, the _spectio_ is taken by some other than the person inaugurated. The priest-king Numa is naturally associated with this ceremony by tradition; by him an appointed augur is employed to watch for signs,[193] and this ceremony of inauguration by one of the priesthood, other than the person so inaugurated, is represented as being from this time onwards a standing part of the procedure requisite for entrance on the regal office. But this legend of Numa is rendered somewhat incredible by the fact that the augurs have no right of _spectio_, and that of all the priests of the Republic it is only the semi-magisterial _pontifex maximus_, the head of the state religion, who has the right of taking auspices. The fact that the _rex sacrorum_ in the Republic had a special inauguration[194] might lend support to the legend, were it not that this _rex_ had become wholly a priest and thus lost his right of intercourse with the gods through the _spectio_. The question of the inauguration of the king, unimportant in itself, runs up into two wider questions; the first is whether there was a separation in idea between the king’s magisterial and his priestly functions; the second, whether the king was himself _pontifex maximus_ and thus the supreme head of the Roman religion. 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]