otnote 56: The account of the last supposed celebration, though in
an enlightened period of history, was so very doubtful and obscure, that
the alternative seems not doubtful. When the popish jubilees, the copy
of the secular games, were invented by Boniface VII., the crafty pope
pretended that he only revived an ancient institution. See M. le Chais,
Lettres sur les Jubiles.]

[Footnote 57: Either of a hundred or a hundred and ten years. Varro and
Livy adopted the former opinion, but the infallible authority of the
Sybil consecrated the latter, (Censorinus de Die Natal. c. 17.) The
emperors Claudius and Philip, however, did not treat the oracle with
implicit respect.]

[Footnote 58: The idea of the secular games is best understood from the
poem of Horace, and the description of Zosimus, 1. l. ii. p. 167, &c.]
Since Romulus, with a small band of shepherds and outlaws, fortified
himself on the hills near the Tyber, ten centuries had already elapsed.
[59] During the four first ages, the Romans, in the laborious school of
poverty, had acquired the virtues of war and government: by the vigorous
exertion of those virtues, and by the assistance of fortune, they had
obtained, in the course of the three succeeding centuries, an absolute
empire over many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The last three
hundred years had been consumed in apparent prosperity and internal
decline. The nation of soldiers, magistrates, and legislators, who
composed the thirty-five tribes of the Roman people, were dissolved into
the common mass of mankind, and confounded with the millions of servile
provincials, who had received the name, without adopting the spirit, of
Romans. A mercenary army, levied among the subjects and barbarians of
the frontier, was the only order of men who preserved and abused their
independence. By their tumultuary election, a Syrian, a Goth, or an
Arab, was exalted to the throne of Rome, and invested with despotic
power over the conquests and over the country of the Scipios.

[Footnote 59: The received calculation of Varro assigns to the
foundation of Rome an aera that corresponds with the 754th year before
Christ. But so little is the chronology of Rome to be depended on, in
the more early ages, that Sir Isaac Newton has brought the same event as
low as the year 627 (Compare Niebuhr vol. i. p. 271.--M.)]

The limits of the Roman empire still extended from the Western Ocean
to the Tigris, and from Mount Atlas to the