[3] Reviewing public opinion of Augustus on the day of his funeral, the historian Tacitus reports that some thought "no honor was left to the gods" when he "established the cult of himself" (se ... coli vellet) "with temples and the effigies of numina" (effigie numinum).
[4] Pliny the Younger in a letter to Paternus raves about the "power", the "dignity", and "the majesty"; in short, the "numen of history".
[1] Since the early 20th century, numen has sometimes been treated in the history of religion as a pre-animistic phase; that is, a belief system inherited from an earlier time.
[13] The supposition that a numinous presence in the natural world supposed in the earliest layers of Italic religion, as it were an "animistic" element left over in historical Roman religion and especially in the etymology of Latin theonyms, has often been popularly implied, but was criticised as "mostly a scholarly fiction" by McGeough (2004).
[14] The phrase "numen eris caeloque redux mirabere regna" appears on line 129 of the poem Metrum in Genesin,[15] attributed to Hilary of Arles.