nological
difficulties, but they did not prove insurmountable. An oracle was set
in circulation, or one actually in circulation was made use of, wherein
it was declared that a great cycle of four times one hundred and ten
years had passed and that a new age was now beginning. The emperor, if
not responsible for this oracle, was very willing to accept it. It was
an essential part of his plan that all things should become new, and
that with the new age should come a new spirit. This new _saeculum_ must
be ushered in by games which should be at once like and unlike those of
past centuries. They were to be celebrated at least in part on the
hallowed spot, the _Tarentum_ in the Campus Martius, they were to extend
through three nights like the old games, but the three days were to be
added as well, and the deities worshipped in the night, while they were
no longer the old gods of the Lower World, Dis and Proserpina, were at
least mysterious deities of fate and fortune, while the gods of the day,
Apollo and Artemis, Juppiter and Juno, were as new to the games as the
day celebrations themselves were. But the equality of Apollo and
Juppiter was expressed not merely in the parallelisation of
Juppiter-Juno with Apollo-Diana. It was still more in evidence on the
third and greatest day of the festival, when the procession of three
times nine youths and three times nine maidens sang the song in honour
of Apollo and Diana, which Horace wrote and which has been preserved to
us among his writings, the _Carmen Saeculare_, and to which in addition
the recently found inscription giving an account of the games bears
witness in the words _carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus_ (_C.I.L._
vi. 32323). On this day the procession started from the Apollo temple on
the Palatine, and went over to the Juppiter temple on the Capitoline,
and then back again to Apollo on the Palatine, thus indicating not only
the equality of Apollo and Juppiter but even the superiority of the
former. A new age had indeed begun, an age in which the new associations
of the Palatine and the glamour of imperialism were to overcome the more
democratic associations of the Capitoline with its incorrigibly
republican Juppiter. Greek gods which had hitherto in theory at least
been subordinated to the gods of old Rome were now granted not only
equality but superiority. The specific cult of Apollo, to be sure, did
not always retain the exalted position to which Augustus had raised it