and now two hundred members, was divided into ten decuries, each being headed by one, who was its leader; these are the decem primi, and they were taken from the Ramnes.  They formed the college, which, when there was no king, undertook the government, one after another, each for five days, but in such a manner that they always succeeded one another in the same order, as we must believe with Livy, for Dionysius here introduces his Greek notions of the Attic prytanes, and Plutarch misunderstands the matter altogether.

After the example of the senate the number of the augurs and pontiffs also was doubled, so that each college consisted of four members, two being taken from the Ramnes and two from the Tities.  Although it is not possible to fix these changes chronologically, as Dionysius and Cicero do, yet they are as historically certain as if we actually knew the kings who introduced them.

Such was Rome in the second stage of its development.  This period of equalization is one of peace, and is described as the reign of Numa, about whom the traditions are simple and brief.  It is the picture of a peaceful condition with a holy man at the head of affairs, like Nicolas von der Flue in Switzerland.  Numa was supposed to have been inspired by the goddess.

Egeria, to whom he was married in the grove of the Camenae, and who introduced him into the choir of her sisters; she melted away in tears at his death, and thus gave her name to the spring which arose out of her tears.  Such a peace of forty years, during which no nation rose against Rome, because Numa’s piety was communicated to the surrounding nations, is a beautiful idea, but historically impossible in those times, and manifestly a poetical fiction.

The death of Numa forms the conclusion of the first saeculum, and an entirely new period follows, just as in the Theogony of Hesiod the age of heroes is followed by the iron age; there is evidently a change, and an entirely new order of things is conceived to have arisen.  Up to this point we have had nothing except poetry, but with Tullus Hostilius a kind of history begins, that is, events are related which must be taken in general as historical, though in the light in which they are presented to us they are not historical.  Thus, for example, the destruction of Alba is historical, and so in all probability is the reception of the Albans at Rome.  The conquests of Ancus Martius are quite credible; and they appear like an oasis of real history in the midst of fables.  A similar case occurs once in the chronicle of Cologne.  In the Abyssinian annals, we find in the thirteenth century a very minute account of one particular event, in which we recognize a piece of contemporaneous history, though we meet with nothing historical either before or after.