Page "Secular Games" Paragraph 4

Celebrations of the Games under the Roman Republic are poorly documented.

Although some Roman antiquarians traced them as far back as 509 BC, some modern scholars consider that the first celebration well attested as having taken place was that of 249 BC, during the First Punic War.

According to Varro, an antiquarian of the 1st century BC, the Games were introduced after a series of portents led to a consultation of the Sibylline Books by the quindecimviri.

In accordance with the instructions contained in these books, sacrifices were offered at the Tarentum on the Campus Martius over three nights, to the underworld deities of Dis Pater and Proserpina.

Varro also states that a vow was made that the Games would be repeated every hundred years, and another celebration did indeed take place in either 149 or 146 BC, at the time of the Third Punic War.

However, Beard, North and Price suggest that the Games of 249 and the 140s BC were both held because of the immediate pressures of war, and that it was only with the revival in the 140s that they came to be considered as a regular centennial celebration.

This sequence would have led to a celebration in 49 BC, but the civil wars apparently prevented this.