The Secular Games

A saeculum was reckoned as the longest span of a human life, and the herald who announced the games invited the people, in a formula Suetonius records, to a spectacle no one alive had seen or would see again. The Sibylline Books, as read by the board of fifteen priests who kept them, set the rites. Augustus, ten years into his rule after the civil wars, used the festival to proclaim an age of peace and plenty.

Much of what we know comes from a long inscription, the official record of the Secular Games, found in fragments near the Tiber in 1890. It sets out the program: night sacrifices at the Tarentum by Augustus to the Fates, the goddesses of childbirth and Mother Earth; daytime sacrifices by Augustus and Marcus Agrippa to Jupiter, Juno, Apollo and Diana; a banquet for Juno and Diana held by 110 married women; and, on the last day, a hymn sung by twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls on the Palatine and the Capitol. The inscription names its author: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet Horace.