The Historians' History of the World 06

As the senate had solemnly marked the end of the wars by closing the temple of Janus, so Augustus desired to mark the end of the period of reorganisation and reconstitution by an imposing symbolical act. Even the ordinary Roman census was not a mere counting up of the people; it was a reconstitution of the ranks of Roman citizenship, and if this tedious and toilsome preparatory labour were to attain legal validity, it must find its ratification and consummation in a final act in which the whole nation should be purified with the most solemn religious rites and commended to the propitious gods for the future. Similarly Augustus had been at work since the year 29 on a reorganisation of Rome, which was finally declared complete in the year 17 by a mighty lustrum, the Secular Festival.

The idea, and probably the name, of the seculum

is not Roman but Etruscan; at least, up to the present time no one has succeeded in discovering any plausible Roman etymology for the word. The seculum is probably of Etruscan origin, like the other elements of chronology among the Romans. This devout nation, which understood as no other did how to inquire into and interpret the will of the gods, fancied that it had learned that the deity did not merely declare to men the ordinary divisions of time into months and years by the path and the varying appearance of moon and sun, but that apart from these there were longer periods in the life of nations which the gods had appointed, and of which they revealed the beginning and the end to the generations of men by manifest tokens. Such a period is that in which one generation dies out and a new one arises, and it therefore extends from the birth to the death of a man who may be taken as the representative of his generation. When the last man died who was born at the beginning of the first seculum, then the second began; and, as the duration of human life seldom exceeds the hundredth year, a new seculum commonly commenced at the end of this period. It did not, however, of necessity last for exactly a hundred years; on the contrary, there had been one of 123 years in length, another of 118, etc.; but the Etruscans reckoned their seculum approximately at 100 years. When therefore the miraculous signs ensued, mortals realised that in the counsels of the gods the end was at hand, and hastened to propitiate the omens by sacrifices and games. In misfortune, men learned to take special heed of the omens of the gods, for they longed for the opportunity of concluding the unfavourable period and beginning a new one, free from ill-fortune and evil presage.

Statue of a Victorious Driver in the Games of the Circus

(In the Vatican)

This grand wisdom of the Etruscans, which looked beyond the limits of human life, made a profound impression on their pupils, the Romans, and was transferred to Rome with the rest of the augural discipline. The family of the Valerii is said to have been the one to introduce this cult into Rome, for themselves alone in the first instance, and not as yet in the name of the state. One of the ancestors of this family, it was said, had come to Rome from his home in the land of the Sabines to propitiate the evil omens which disturbed him there. He came down the Tiber with his sick children till he reached the vicinity of Rome, and there, where the Field of Mars is narrowest, near the bank of the Tiber, was formerly a spot noted for volcanic phenomena, hot springs, and subterranean fire—the so-called Tarentum. The sick children were cured by the water of the neighbouring spring, and twenty feet below the surface of the ground the father found a primitive altar to the infernal gods, to whom he gave thanks for the miraculous cure by sacrifices, games, and lectisternia. A descendant of his is said to have been one P. Valerius Publicola, who, as consul in the first year of the republic (509) repeated these games of his family cult in the name and for the welfare of the state of Rome. It was essential to the secular theory of later generations that so important an epoch as the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the republic should have been marked by public secular games.