Rome, I beseech thee to give sure and evident signs of it within those bounds which I have marked." Then he stated in set terms the omens which he wished to be sent; and on their being sent, Numa was declared king and came down from the stand. [Footnote 23: _Ex quibus locis, quæ fama in Sabinos, aut quo linguæ commercio ---- quenquam excivisset_. "From which (remote) places, what high character of him (could have reached) to the Sabines, or by what intercourse of language could such high character of him have aroused any one to become a pupil?" Other editions read _quâ famâ_; thus, from which places by what high character for talent, or by what intercourse of language, could he, Pythagoras, have aroused any one, etc.?] 19. Having thus obtained the kingdom, he sets about establishing anew, on the principles of laws and morals, the city recently established by violence and arms. When he saw that their minds, as having been rendered ferocious by military life, could not be reconciled to those principles during the continuance of wars, considering that a fierce people should be mollified by the disuse of arms, he erected at the foot of Argiletum a temple of Janus, as an index of peace and war; that when open, it might show the state was engaged in war, and when shut, that all the neighbouring nations were at peace with it. Twice only since the reign of Numa hath this temple been shut; once when T. Manlius was consul, at the end of the first Punic war; and a second time, which the gods granted our age to see, by the emperor Augustus Cæsar, after the battle of Actium, peace being established by sea and land. This being shut, after he had secured the friendship of the neighbouring states around by alliance and treaties, all anxiety regarding dangers from abroad being removed, lest their minds, which the fear of enemies and military discipline had kept in check, should become licentious by tranquillity, he considered, that, first of all, an awe of the gods should be instilled into them, a principle of the greatest efficacy with a multitude ignorant and uncivilized as in those times. But as it could not sink deeply into their minds without some fiction of a miracle, he pretends that he holds nightly interviews with the goddess Egeria; that by her direction he instituted the sacred rites which would be most acceptable to the gods, and appointed proper priests for each of the deities. And, first of all, he divides the year into twelve months, according to the course of the moon; and because the moon does not make up thirty days in each month, and some days are wanting to the complete year as constituted by the solstitial revolution, he so portioned it out by inserting intercalary months, that every twenty-fourth year, the lengths of all the intermediate years being completed, the days should correspond to the same place of the sun (in the heavens) whence they had set out.[24] He likewise made a distinction of the days[25] into