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My Library is for my historical and academic pursuits. Here you will find the books I have written as well as the books I have acquired for my collection from other citizens. Please feel free to browse! Here you will also find a collection of post that I have made to historical and academic boards. My particular historical interests in Ancient Rome are....
SECULAR GAMES (Ludi Saeculares, originally Terentini). These were celebrated at Rome for three days and nights to mark the commencement of a new saeculum or generation. It is important to note that there was a saeculum civile, the length of which was definitely fixed at 100 years, and a .saeculum naturale, which, under Greek and Etruscan influence, came to be accepted by the quindecimviri as 110 years. According to tradition, the secular games had their origin in certain sacrificial rites of the gens Valeria, which were performed at the Terentum, a volcanic cleft in the Campus Martius. According to the Roman antiquarians themselves, they were derived from the Etruscans, who, at the end of a mean period of ioo years (as representing the longest human life in a generation), presented to the chthonian deities an expiatory offering on behalf of the coming generation. The first definitely attested celebration of the games took place in 249 B.C., on which occasion a vow was made that they should be repeated every hundredth year (their name being also changed to Saeculares), a regulation which seems to have been immediately disregarded, for they were next held in 146 (not 149, although the authorities are not unanimous); in 49 the civil wars prevented any celebration. They would probably have fallen entirely into oblivion, had not Augustus revived them in 17 B.C., for which occasion the Carmen Saecul are was composed by Horace. In explanation of the selection of this year it is supposed that the quindecimviri invented celebrations for the years 456, 346, 236, 126, the saeculum being taken as lasting 110 years.
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