The senators
bore his bier, which was attended by the chief priests, while the crowd
of men, women and children who were present, followed with such weeping
and wailing, that one would have thought that, instead of an aged king,
each man was about to bury his own dearest friend, who had died in the
prime of life. At his own wish, it is said, the body was not burned, but
placed in two stone coffins and buried on the Janiculum Hill. One of
these contained his body, and the other the sacred books which he
himself had written, as Greek legislators write their laws upon tablets.
During his life he had taught the priests the contents of these books,
and their meaning and spirit, and ordered them to be buried with his
corpse, because it was right that holy mysteries should be contained,
not in soulless writings, but in the minds of living men. For the same
reason they say that the Pythagoreans never reduced their maxims to
writing, but implanted them in the memories of worthy men; and when some
of their difficult processes in geometry were divulged to some unworthy
men, they said that Heaven would mark its sense of the wickedness which
had been committed by some great public calamity; so that, as Numa's
system so greatly resembled that of Pythagoras, we can easily pardon
those who endeavour to establish a connection between them.
Valerius of Antium says that twelve sacred books and twelve books of
Greek philosophy were placed in the coffin.
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