Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Chapter Seventeen of Plutarch's <jats:italic>Life of Numa</jats:italic> is well known to students of early Rome for the statement that it was the second king of Rome who created <jats:italic>collegia</jats:italic> for the craftsmen of Rome. Nor is Plutarch alone in his belief: two passages of Pliny's <jats:italic>Natural History</jats:italic> attribute the <jats:italic>collegia</jats:italic> of the bronze workers and brick makers to Numa (XXXIV, I; XXXV, 159); Pliny indeed seems to refer to an actual list of <jats:italic>collegia</jats:italic> in which these two figured. On the other hand, neither Cicero in the <jats:italic>Republic</jats:italic> nor Livy nor Dionysius displays any knowledge of such an initiative by Numa; an entirely different tradition indeed appears in Florus, according to which it was Servius Tullius who distributed the Roman people between <jats:italic>collegia</jats:italic>, in the general context of his timocratic organization of the census classes (1, 6, 3).</jats:p>