The Legend of the Secular Games

At a Glance

• Central figures: Valesius, a wealthy Sabine farmer whose children fell ill with plague; Dis Pater and Proserpina, the gods of the underworld to whom the original rites were directed; and Augustus, who revived the games in 17 BCE with the poet Horace composing the ceremonial hymn.
• Setting: Rome’s Campus Martius, specifically the underground altar called Tarentum near a bend in the Tiber, and the Capitoline and Palatine hills; the tradition spans from the early Republic through the Augustan age.
• The turn: Valesius, following a divine voice, boiled water from the Tiber over a hidden altar at Tarentum and gave it to his dying children, who recovered - revealing a sacred site and a debt owed to the gods of the earth.
• The outcome: The Senate institutionalized the Ludi Saeculares as a once-per-generation ceremony, performed at intervals of roughly 110 years, marking the passage of one saeculum and the ritual rebirth of the next.
• The legacy: The Secular Games survived into the imperial period, celebrated by Augustus in 17 BCE, by Claudius in 47 CE, by Domitian in 88 CE, and by Septimius Severus in 204 CE, each time reasserting Rome’s covenant with the gods who governed time itself.

A man’s three children were dying, and no physician in the Sabine country could tell him why. The fever had come without explanation - no bad water, no plague in the neighboring farms, just three small bodies burning. Valesius did what any Roman would do. He went to the hearth, knelt before the lares, and asked what he owed.

The voice that answered did not come from the household gods. It came from somewhere lower. It told him to take the children to Tarentum and give them water heated over the altar of Dis Pater and Proserpina. Valesius knew of no such altar. He knew Tarentum as a city in the south, a Greek colony far from Rome. He loaded his children onto a boat and headed down the Tiber anyway.

The Hidden Altar at the Bend in the River

The boat did not reach the sea. Near the Campus Martius, where the Tiber turns, Valesius’s children grew worse. He pulled ashore, desperate, and built a fire on the riverbank to heat water for them. He dug a shallow pit for the coals - and struck stone. Not natural stone. Worked stone, squared and fitted, buried under centuries of silt.

It was an altar. Valesius scraped the mud from its face and found the inscription: it was consecrated to Dis Pater and Proserpina, the rulers of the dead, the keepers of what lies beneath. The place was called Tarentum - not the Greek city but a spot in the Campus Martius, named for the same root, a place where the earth opened toward the underworld.

He boiled the river water over that altar. He gave it to his children. They drank, slept through the night, and by morning the fever had broken. All three lived.

Valesius understood. The gods below had called him here. He had found their altar by following their instructions literally, and the literal truth had saved his household. What remained was to pay the debt. He slaughtered dark-colored victims on the altar that night - black animals, as was proper for chthonic gods - and held a vigil of three nights, with fires burning and hymns sung in the old formulas. The rites he performed became the template for everything that followed.

The Reckoning of the Saeculum

The Romans measured time differently from other peoples. A saeculum was not a fixed century. It was the span of the longest human life in a given generation - roughly 100 to 110 years, the time it took for every person alive at the start of a period to die. When the last survivor of a generation perished, the saeculum ended. A new one began. The transition was dangerous. Old covenants with the gods expired. New ones had to be sealed.

The quindecimviri sacris faciundis - the board of fifteen priests who kept the Sibylline Books - determined when each saeculum turned. They consulted the oracles, examined the records, and announced the date. The Senate then ordered the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games, to be performed at Tarentum.

The earliest recorded celebration fell in 249 BCE, during the First Punic War, when Rome’s survival was uncertain and the gods of the underworld needed propitiation. The rites lasted three nights and three days. On the nights, sacrifices went to Dis Pater and Proserpina at the underground altar - dark victims, torchlit processions, hymns sung by choruses of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls chosen from families with both parents living. On the days, sacrifices went to Jupiter on the Capitoline, to Juno on the same hill, and to Apollo and Diana on the Palatine. The structure was deliberate: night belonged to the gods below, day to the gods above. The entire divine order received its due.

Augustus at Tarentum

By 17 BCE, the games had not been celebrated in over a century. The civil wars had consumed Rome. Sulla, Caesar, Antony, Octavian - four generations of Romans had bled into each other, and the ritual calendar had collapsed under the weight of political murder. Augustus, having finally closed the doors of the Temple of Janus to mark peace, turned to the Sibylline Books and found the prescription for renewal.

He commissioned the quindecimviri to compute the date. He ordered the underground altar at Tarentum excavated and restored. He personally presided over the three nights of sacrifice, standing at the altar in the priestly robe, pouring libations of milk and wine into the earth. The suovetaurilia - the triple sacrifice of pig, sheep, and bull - was performed on the Capitoline for Jupiter. Cakes of a special recipe, made from wheat, barley, and beans, were distributed to the citizens who attended.

For the daylight ceremonies, Augustus turned to Horace. The poet composed the Carmen Saeculare, a hymn performed by the twin choruses of boys and girls on the third day, standing on the Palatine within sight of Apollo’s new temple. The hymn addressed Apollo and Diana directly, asking them to bless Rome’s children, Rome’s harvests, Rome’s laws. It mentioned no war. It mentioned no emperor by name. It asked for the continuation of what was good and the turning away of what was harmful. Horace understood what was required: not flattery, but prayer in the old mode, addressed to gods who did not need to be told they were powerful.

The Coins and the Record

Augustus minted coins to mark the occasion. They showed the altar at Tarentum, the sacrificial animals, and the legend LVD SAEC - Ludi Saeculares. He also had the full proceedings inscribed on marble and set up in the Campus Martius. Fragments of this inscription survived into the modern era, recovered from the Tiber mud, confirming the details that the literary sources preserved.

Claudius held the next games in 47 CE, computing from the founding of Rome rather than from Augustus’s celebration, which produced a different count. Domitian held them in 88 CE, counting from Augustus. The arithmetic never quite agreed, and each emperor adjusted the interval to suit his own reign. The theological justification shifted too - under Augustus the rites honored Apollo and Diana as prominently as Dis Pater, reflecting the Augustan program of solar renewal. Under later emperors the emphasis moved further from the underworld and closer to Jupiter and the imperial cult.

The Last Fires at Tarentum

Septimius Severus celebrated the final recorded Secular Games in 204 CE. By then the Campus Martius had been built over many times, and the exact location of the old altar was uncertain. Severus had it found again, cleared, and consecrated. The three-night vigil was performed. The choruses sang. The coins were struck.

After 204, no emperor revived them. The saeculum turned and turned again without acknowledgment. Philip the Arab may have held games in 248 CE for Rome’s thousandth anniversary, but these were spectacles, not the old rites. The altar at Tarentum sank back into the silt. The Sibylline Books, consulted for the last time by Julian, were eventually burned by Stilicho around 405 CE.

What Valesius had begun with boiled river water and a father’s desperation - the simple act of heating what the earth provided and giving it to the dying - had become the most solemn ceremony the Roman state possessed. It marked not victory, not conquest, not the birthday of a god, but something rarer: the bare fact that one generation had ended and another had begun, and that the contract between Rome and its gods needed to be written again from the first line.