nt material, in which some marbles
were found covered with inscriptions relating to this same
celebration.[930] This treasure was badly mutilated, but the inscription
was easily decipherable; it contains a letter from Augustus giving
instructions, two decrees of the Senate, and a series of records of the
Quindecemviri, who were of course in charge of a ritual which had been
ordered by a Sibylline oracle. Some few points were at first puzzling,
but have been cleared up since the discovery. Mommsen, of course, took
the work in hand, and his exposition is still, and always will be, the
starting-point for students. Wissowa has an excellent popular account of
it, and recently, in the fifth volume of his _Greatness and Decline of
Rome_, Ferrero has utilised it to give an animated account of the whole
ceremony.[931]

The _Ludi saeculares_ take their name from the word _saeculum_; and the
old Italian idea of a _saeculum_ seems to have been a period stretching
from any given moment to the death of the oldest person born at that
moment,--a hundred years being the natural period so conceived.[932]
Thus a new saeculum might begin at any time, and might be endowed with
special religious significance by certain solemn ceremonies; in this way
the people might be persuaded that a new leaf, so to speak, had been
turned over in their history: that all past evil, material or moral, had
been put away and done with (_saeculum condere_), and a new period
entered on of innocence and prosperity. There are faint traces of three
early celebrations of this kind, beginning in 463 B.C., traditionally a
disastrous year, and renewed in 363 and 263. But in 249, another year of
distress and peril, a new saeculum was entered on with a new and a Greek
ritual, ordered by a Sibylline oracle. A subterranean altar in a spot
by the Tiber, near the present Ponte St. Angelo, and called Tarentum
(possibly to mark the original home of the rite), was dedicated to Dis
and Proserpina, Greek deities of the nether world; and here for three
successive nights black victims were offered to them. The subterranean
altar and the use of the word _condere_ (to put away), might suggest
that this rite may have had something in common with those well-known
quasi-dramatic ones in which objects are _buried_ or thrown into the
water, to represent the cessation of one period of vegetation and the
beginning of another.[933] Or we may look on it in the light of one of
those _rites de