NIGHT FALLS ON THE CITY. THIS IS NO ORDINARY NIGHT.
The calendar marks tonight as the Kalends of June in the 737th year from the founding of Rome. (We would say, May 31, 17 BCE.) The month of the longest days and shortest nights is beginning, and tonight the moon is near full. It will be a night without true darkness, and each of the next two will be like this. The exact full moon will fall two mornings hence.
The city has been mainly at peace for more than a decade and its ruler is now a man in his full years of power, in his mid-forties, “grave” but not (quite yet) “old” on a Roman reckoning that saw you from infancy to boyhood to adolescence to youth to gravity to old age. To say his name is to take a position on the politics of his age, but there isn’t much choice. Call him Caesar Augustus—it’s best not to annoy the lord of the world. If I called him his birth name, Gaius Octavius Thurinus, few would even have an idea of whom I was speaking, and if I settled for a modernized version of his interim names, such as “Octavian,” I would be emphasizing his rise to power, where “Augustus” points to what he made of himself.
The poet Ovid got the political statement of his chosen name just right: “He has a name in common with highest Jupiter, for the ancients call divine things ‘august,’ ‘august’ are called temples consecrated ritely by the hands of priests.”1 A cloud of piety hovers over Caesar Augustus’s head, while blood drips from his hands. He was shrewd and lucky at critical moments in his life, with a shrewdness now laudable, now detestable. His greatest success was not entirely his own doing: he lived to a ripe old age.
He entered public life at age eighteen, thrust forward by the assassination of his uncle Julius Caesar and his selection as adopted heir. He fought to keep life and limb together and to build his power. By his early thirties, he had bet on his inheritance and on the city of Rome itself and he had outlasted, defeated, and done his enemies to death. Mark Antony was the last of them, defeated in the sea battle at Actium in 31 BCE. Antony had bet on his own star and on a different city—cosmopolitan, wealthy, venerable Alexandria. Rome’s capital would eventually, with Constantine, move east to Constantinople; with Antony it might have moved earlier to Egypt. With Augustus triumphant, the not-really-eternal Rome had a respite of a few centuries. From Actium to his deathbed in 14 CE, Augustus saw his world through another forty-four years, fifty-seven in all from his uncle’s murder.
In the year we call 17 BCE, fear had not been forgotten. The last serious plot against Augustus had been only five years earlier, and he had been seriously ill not long after. He was now Augustus the ruler—as opposed to the general—in the way that posterity would remember him. He no longer exercised formal consular authority year to year, but depended on the veto power of the office of tribune to supplement his prestige and manifold influence over Roman life. In the year before this night, he famously promoted formal legislation on marriage, penalizing the unwed and the adulterous and supporting childbearers.
He was also taking care that public representations of him moved firmly away from the heroic (often nude) sculpture that promoted his ambitions when he was young and fighting for his life and a throne. Now he preferred to be seen wearing the toga of civil life and, as often as possible, to be depicted performing sacrifice or in other postures of piety and deference to the gods.2 He held various religious offices through these years, though not yet, by bad luck, the highest religious office, that of pontifex maximus. The “pontiffs” were the public sacrificers, and the pontifex maximus was the most senior of them, embodying a role that originally went back to the time of the kings of pre-Republican Rome. That title was still held by Lepidus, the other surviving generalissimo of the bad years, discreetly in retirement on the coast fifty miles south of Rome. He never came to the city, but the diversity of religious rites, offices, and opportunities gave Augustus ample room to be seen in public as the one leading Rome at worship. Lepidus would die in 12 BCE, leaving the title for Augustus and his successors.
In securing his later boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, Augustus constructed temples to great gods. He honored his benefactor, whom people were persuaded to believe had become a god, the “divine Julius” (divus Iulius), but also erected fresh temples to Apollo on the Palatine hill (we will spend time there), to Venus Genetrix (“Venus Our Mother”) in the forum Julius Caesar had built, to Mars Ultor (“Mars the Avenger”) in the forum Augustus built himself, and to Jupiter Tonans (“Jupiter Who Thunders”) on the Capitoline. Then there was renovation and rededication of the temple of “Quirinus” (an alternative name for Romulus) on the Quirinal. Further down the social ladder, Augustus reformed city administration and emphasized neighborhood units for control and management. Each neighborhood had its own shrinelet to the lares, the “tutelary deities” we say, of the locality. Think of them as bodyguards, or divine soldiers, or perhaps the divine cops on the beat, while the famous gods in the big temples were the great warriors and commanders.
The city at the heart of Augustus’s realm, the old city, the real city, was still small and crowded. The bend in the Tiber and the small island here offered early residents and visitors easy crossing of the river at almost all seasons. Just below the city, the river opens out and its shores become waterlogged and so land traffic was effectively prevented along the coast in that direction; while farther up the river, the terrain became more rugged and uneven, offering different discouragement. The site is not unlike that of Washington, D.C., and London in that regard, where modern Georgetown and Westminster found their sites for similar reasons.
The site was liable to flooding in the rainy months of winter. The seven “hills” of the city stay dry and offered needed refuge, because even though the center of the city, the Forum, is a dozen or so meters above river level, it repeatedly flooded in historic times until modern engineering intervened. (A seventeenth-century engraving shows boats and boatmen plashing about inside the domed space of the Pantheon, whose floor is about ten meters above the river.) The heart of the city known since earliest times, then, stayed between and atop those hills bunched around the Forum—the Capitoline, Palatine, Caelian, Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline. (Counting up to seven hills required including the Aventine a few hundred yards past the Palatine along the next bend of the Tiber and technically outside the official city limits.)
The commercial business of the place began just where the gap between the Capitoline and the Palatine opens out to the river shore, here where we imagine we are standing by our little temples. From the Capitoline and the Forum, a circle no more than a mile in radius encompasses all the ancient city, which broke those bounds only very slowly and carefully. Flood-fearing prudence was one reason, but religious prescription another, for there was a sacred boundary of the city called the pomerium, marked not by walls but by modest boundary stones. Strict rules governed that border; so a general had to give up his bodyguard to cross it on entering the city, the place of peace, while certain religious figures were not allowed to cross it and leave the city during their term of office. What the gods preserved most vehemently was that small core of the city.
The wealthy still maintained their primary homes very close to the center (Cicero’s house was on the Palatine, a five minutes’ walk from the Senate), supplementing them with villas in the country or south along the Latin and Campanian shore down to the bay of Naples. The poor found themselves aswarm up the often fetid valleys between the low-rising Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline on the side of town away from the river. (They were fetid not least because even with great efforts at managing the flow of water and sewage, a crowded ancient city manufactured odors far more efficiently than it could dispose of them, especially in warm, humid weather.)
But then outside the pomerium was the Campus Martius, the field of Mars. It lay, most of a square mile, flat and boggy on the edges, outside the city lines, north of the Capitoline, inside the bend of the Tiber in the direction of what is now Vatican City across the river. In the modern city, the Via del Corso runs north from the Capitoline along the east side of the Campus, and all the area from there west to the river, along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and including places like the Piazza Navona, was strictly outside the city and only beginning to be developed in Augustus’s time. It was Mars’s field because the army—forbidden from entering the city—would originally camp and train there, but it was also the place of assemblies and elections, the only one that now could handle the crowds of the city’s formal ceremonies.
Over the century before Augustus, wealthy Romans began to build into this area. The Theater of Pompey was the most elaborate construction there, combining spectacle, temple, and urban buzz. If a formal, permanent theater building felt a little daring and risqué to staid Romans, then making the theater building in the form of a temple sanitized it and gave Pompey a chance to display wealth and power on a scale grander than anything possible inside the city walls. (Pompey died in Egypt in 49 BCE, during the civil wars, but had his posthumous revenge when Julius Caesar was assassinated at the feet of his statue in the temple/theater complex when the Senate met there on the Ides of March in 44.)
This night’s rituals would begin on a far edge of the field of Mars, where development had not yet edged too close to the river. To get there we would walk up along the riverbank, stopping just short of the bend in the river where the tomb of Hadrian (the “Castel Sant’Angelo”) now looms across the stream. Modern tour guides don’t bother with this spot.
Before we can see what happened, we have to know a legend.
It seems there was a man named Valesius, a founder of the influential Valerian family and a great man among the Sabines, Rome’s neighbors up-country to the northeast. Things went badly for him. Lightning struck the trees that shaded his house and his children fell ill. He consulted the experts—quacks and medicine men, we might say, if we were unsympathetic—and they told him that the gods were angry. Reasonable fellow that he was, Valesius took to sacrificing to the gods to propitiate them. (How does sacrifice make the gods less angry? We’ll talk about that later.) Desperate for his children’s health and seeing no improvement, he was on the point of offering the very ancient goddess Vesta his own and his wife’s lives, but then he heard a voice among the fire-ruined trees. Take your children to Tarentum, it said, and heat some Tiber water at the altars of Pluto and Proserpina, the gods of the underworld. Give the water to your children to drink and they will be well.
This made no sense. Tarentum, modern Taranto, was far away to the south on the coast of Italy, with no Tiber water anywhere in the vicinity. And the gods of the underworld? The thought of involving them would alarm anyone. The voice repeated itself and so, good man of legend dealing with gods that he was, Valesius put his children in a small boat on the river, taking along a well-nursed bit of fire with him in order to do the gods’ will. He came along the river to a quiet place for the night and took refuge with—who else?—a shepherd, who told him that the name of this nowhere place was, of all things, Tarentum. (Divine commands often have these tricky bits of wordplay in them.) So of course he did as he was told, heated up a little Tiber water, the children drank, and they were well.
Now another vision came to them, in their recuperative sleep, a huge godlike man telling them to offer black victims to Pluto and Proserpina of the underworld and to spend three nights singing and dancing in their honor. They’re to do this all in the Campus Martius. Valesius by now knows well what kind of story he’s in, so he sets to work to build an altar for the gods. When he and some men dig down on the chosen site, they find an altar inscribed to Pluto and Proserpina already there. At this point, there’s no choice: sacrifices, singing, dancing—and thus the pleasure of the gods.
That story hovered in the background for everything that happened over these first days of June.
The place we’ve reached was old Tarentum. In 1890, a huge stone tablet was unearthed just there at the northwestern end of the Campus Martius, bearing a detailed inscription telling us what happened and where on just these nights. It was dug roughly between the modern church of St. John of the Florentines and the bridge that carries the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele across the river to join up with the Via della Consolazione and its grand approach to the Vatican. That bridge had just been designed but not yet built, as part of the creation of modern traffic and river management in this area. (The actual ground level today right here is five to ten meters higher than it was in antiquity, and river walls now make sure that the Tiber behaves itself.) Not only was there the inscription, but we have a good idea from later texts that there were two small temples to Pluto (also called Dis) and Proserpina at this site. This makes sense from the legend, but it is also plausible for the purposes of Augustus’s own ceremonies.
This spot would have been pretty soggy through the winter months, right out on the edge of the city (the Vatican was a suburb of no interest at the time). When the winter rains ended, men could be put to work clearing and drying open land for a spring festival. If the place were called Tarentum and the legend and past events had attached themselves to it—as seems to be the case—all the better. If there were a couple of caves in the riverbank, out here at the back of beyond, stories about the underworld and bad things happening would gravitate here. With no bridge, no buildings, no normal access, this would have been a spooky place on a dark night. Business that wanted to hide from attention came here, but stray wayfarers might come to a bad end, even just disappear into the river with a splash, turning up dead and bloated miles away.
Valesius’s legend had already been employed in the service of religious ritual here. At least once before, in 149 or 146 BCE, at the culmination of the third Punic war against Carthage, the “games of the century” had been held more or less on this site, and there’s a reasonable chance something similar had happened in 249 as well. The underlying idea was clear in the name of the event: ludi saeculares.3
Saeculum was a word that did business more or less where we use the word century. It pointed to an “age,” a lifetime of maximum extent, and had roots in planting and in the name of the god Saturn, Jupiter’s overthrown father. Though average lifetimes were short, some people did already live to astonishing ages in antiquity, and so without our decimal precision the length of an age was thought to be something like a century. The “games” of the age/century were thus meant to take place only just as often as they could without any living human being able to attend them twice, even in infancy and great age.4 They were intended to be a “once in a lifetime” experience.
Games? No one has made a better translation in English for ludi, a word that ranges in meaning from a children’s pastime to stage plays to religious pageants to chariot races. German Feier, “celebration,” does a bit better job with some of the meaning. The word ludi is applied to the whole constellation of activities, from sacrifices to horse races to hymn-singing in front of a temple.
We have a good idea what would have happened in the games of 249 and 149. Called then the ludi Tarentini, after the place, they were rites for the dark of a moonless night. The main sacrifices offered a black bull to Dis/Pluto and a black cow to Proserpina, then ritual banquets to which the gods were invited. In what was called the lectisternium, figures of male gods were arrayed on banquet couches as wealthy men might be—and wealthy men would be invited as well. Then came the ritual meal, sharing the product of sacrifice. Next came the sellisternium, for goddesses and women only, now with more dignified chairs replacing the couches used by menfolk. After the sacrifices, three nights of shows and games would follow. Everything about the ritual was of the night, of the gods of the darkness, and doubtless carried out by flickering torchlight.
More than once in the years before Augustus, people had thought it was time to mount the games of the century again. Julius Caesar was busy fighting a civil war in 49 BCE, and in that war and the renewed conflict after his assassination, no one volunteered to placate the gods of the underworld. The powers of death were appeased by other religious means if at all, or at least by the eventual success of Augustus in eradicating and terrifying his opposition. It made every good sense that the supreme citizen should revive now this venerable rite—for reviving venerable rites was much his way.
Or was it? One of the keenest modern observers, Eduard Fraenkel, captured Augustus’s way as the monarch’s instinct to abolish the old order of the Roman Republic by making a great show of his intention to rejuvenate it.5 (That trick has been imitated by many since.) In many and fundamental ways, the mission Augustus set for himself was to invent a new order while making out to all and sundry that he was not only not changing anything at all but was really only restoring, strengthening, and refreshing what had been there and been of value all along.
When the thought of mounting the games of the century again came to Augustus and his circle, they saw the value of hosting the old celebration in a remarkably new way. Their views are carved in stone, on that inscription discovered at the site. There we read of the preliminary deliberations, which arose when the college of quindecemviri sacris faciundis (“the fifteen in charge of performing rites”) met to consult the Sibylline books. That assurance already should make us nervous.
The Sibylline books were very ancient, going back to the time of the kings five centuries and more earlier, books of Greek hexameter verse to be consulted when the gods were unhappy. Their purpose was not to help predict the future directly, but to determine what it would take to placate the gods—and thus produce a better future. For a very long time, these books were kept locked away beneath the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, never seen publicly but scrutinized confidentially. They were under the control of the quindecemviri, senior statesmen, originally meant to be beyond public affairs and with no other public responsibility. In a matter of this importance, the quindecemviri would review the books, report to the Senate, and recommend the ceremonies they judged appropriate.
Before we hear the unprecedented rituals they recommended in this case, we need to notice something a little odd about the venerable and ancient Sibylline books of the year 17. They were brand-new.
In 83 BCE, when the generals Marius and Sulla were at war for control of Senate and state, the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline burned down. Everything within it, including the Sibylline books, was destroyed. Sixty meters by sixty meters in floor plan, the temple had towered over the city, with Jupiter flanked by Juno and Minerva, Jupiter looming in a great cult statue inside and in another as charioteer atop the building. Its destruction was a spectacle without parallel and, as it happened, a most accurate predictor of the grim half century that would follow for Rome. Fifteen years it took to rebuild, though it and its successors would burn several more times in antiquity.
The Sibylline books were lost in that fire, but not gone forever. By 76 BCE, the Senate had sent out a delegation to tour religious sites of the Greek world collecting replacements. A fresh collection of Greek oracular texts, sifted and sorted by the quindecemviri, were put in place in the new temple. What seems like rank humbuggery went over astonishingly well, with no Roman source troubled by this process. The texts were oracularly obscure at best, and their interpretation involved a variety of mechanical processes, such as taking acrostics of the first letter of each line of a section of verse and then drawing out various permutations and combinations of those letters. Any books of a suitably divine quality were probably acceptable. (We’ll see the scribe Ezra, after the Babylonian captivity, perform a similar service of reinvention for the books of the Torah.)
Augustus was warm to the Sibyllines and their use. When he took his great house atop the Palatine hill, he erected alongside it a temple in honor of Apollo—a kinder, gentler Apollo than the plague bringer of the Iliad, a figure of beauty and wisdom and strength (who reminded Augustus of himself). Then he discreetly brought the Sibylline books down from Jupiter’s temple and entrusted them to Apollo, where he could himself keep an eye on them. Henceforth the quindecemviri of the next centuries (the last were still doing their business four hundred years later) would always consult the Sibyllines under imperial supervision. Only a very rude person would pause to wonder whether the books were perfectly immune to further supplementation, correction, and humbuggery.
Since Etruscan lore on matters of divination was highly regarded, the grave and learned scholar Ateius Capito, of an old Etruscan family, author of books on the pontiffs and augurs, was brought in to help interpret the texts. With perhaps a few hints and nods from Augustus, a program was set and the preparations begun. It was no accident at all that the ceremonies would fall on the bright nights of May 31 and June 1 and 2, and in that choice was the fundamental change in the old rituals that Augustus insisted on. Though they would begin at the ancient site and pay respects to the worship of underworld gods, these games of the century would be games of light, on bright nights and long bright days, linking night sacrifice to day, and with gods chosen very carefully for the purpose.
First, that boggy place was remade for the occasion. The old, small temples for Pluto/Dis and Proserpina would not suit for sacrifice to other gods, so new purpose-made wooden altars were erected. The most powerful and important people in Rome would attend, so space and dry footing befitting great dignity would be carved out and assured. Throngs might be near, but the ceremonies themselves would be conducted with propriety, in a circle of well-washed and well-oiled faces. The masters of ceremonies were careful to stipulate that these rites and games would be unusually inclusive in two important ways. Importantly in light of Augustus’s marriage legislation, the order was given that unmarried citizens would be allowed to attend (with some hope of future fertility), but even more remarkably these games would be open to full participation by women—at least women of the right social standing. Night sacrifices that women would attend called for particular care and attention, not just at the site, but for the coming and going on the mile or so that separated this corner of town from the more appropriately urban and dignified regions closer to the Forum.
Along the line of the Tiber as it made its way back southeastward from the Tarentum site toward the heart of the city, a racecourse and stages and stands had been built. That entertainment zone was large even by our standards, something like 350 meters long and 150 meters wide. All this had taken weeks at least and reshaped for the moment the whole landscape of the river and the Campus. Not many would attend the sacrifices and religious ceremonies and be able to stand or crouch close enough to see the great and the good at prayer, but many more would be able to throng the streets, follow the processions, and cheer the plays and contests. Among the preparations, then, for the last days of May, the quindecemviri themselves, great men all, sat on the steps of the temples of Jupiter Capitoline and Apollo Palatine, greeting all comers and handing out the makings of festival. Torches with pitch and bitumen for coating and fuel were given out. Those torches would reappear lighting the way back and forth between the center of the city and the sites of sacrifice and spectacle. At the temple of Diana on the Aventine, wheat, barley, and beans were handed out to those who would bring these foodstuffs back as offerings to the gods, especially Diana herself, in the course of the rituals.
Certainly people who made their residence in the city and its environs knew that a great event was going on; harder to tell how many people from the surrounding rural districts and the next towns to Rome knew or cared or came to see the show. Dignitaries from the city and surrounding towns who could make sure they were seen would be more likely to attend. The ordinary life of the city likely did not come to a halt, most particularly for women and young children of the ordinary town classes, to say nothing of slaves, but there was undeniably a considerable stir. Many people had a notional care for how the gods dealt with the state, but all were far more interested in their own private dealings with the gods, which took place much closer to home—or at a cemetery. A modern Jew, Christian, or Muslim who goes to a gigantic holiday liturgy is attending for his own benefit, not merely as a spectator. Not so the ancient Roman on these occasions.
The sun sets at Rome that season around half past seven. Bustle and preparation would have begun as the sun neared setting, but the real night hours would have run from a bit after 8 P.M. to just before 4 A.M. With two days to go until full moon, the near-complete globe loomed in the east already before sunset. From the Tarentum site, that meant that the moon rose over the Capitol and other hills of the city center, and as the night progressed, it would stand higher and brighter in that direction, then move above and beyond to cross the river and set some time around dawn.
As twilight dimmed, the greater dignitaries came lighted by torches. As night set in, the presiding officers emerged into full view: Augustus himself and, scarcely second to him, his indispensable son-in-law and friend, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Born like Augustus in the year Cicero destroyed Catiline, Agrippa was the future Augustus’s friend from adolescence, a leading officer in the war years, and a pillar of Augustus’s reign. He was lucky in his fathers-in-law: first he married the daughter of Cicero’s great and wealthy friend Atticus and later, in 21 BCE, Augustus’s only child, Julia. At the moment of the ludi saeculares, Julia had borne him one son and would bear a second just two weeks after the celebrations began. These boys would be the great hopes of succession for Augustus and Agrippa, as their father was at the height of his public and private influence at this moment, leaving in a few weeks on a military command in the East for his friend and master. (Agrippa died in 11 BCE and both of his boys died young, one of illness, one of war wounds, in 2 and 4 CE, leaving Augustus at that point with no real succession choice but his lumpy stepson, Tiberius.)
Sacrifice began. Augustus and Agrippa themselves were the presiding “priests” for this event, but they were surrounded by a scrum of colleagues and assistants, including the rest of the quindecemviri sacris faciundis. At a moment like this, when getting every detail of the prescribed ritual exactly right was important, there were always functionaries at the great men’s elbows to guide and correct and supplement what they did.
The invisible partners were very fussy. There was a particular way to perform the ritual and make the gifts and if it were not followed exactly, all bets were off. If flaws in performance were detected during the ceremonies, then a halt had to be called, messes cleaned up, and everything had to start over. If things went badly for the community afterward, there was a decent chance that someone would observe that the sacrifices must have gone wrong somehow (perhaps even remembering after the fact this or that error of procedure), and so the only way to safety was to undertake the whole business over again from scratch.
Words first, of course. Tonight the sacrifices began in the darkest place, appealing to the Moerae, the fates, the goddesses who determined how long life would last and when it would end. Called now by Greek names and worshipped in the Greek way, they were thought to be cold and unfeeling, but all the more worth attention from mortals for that reason. If they could be placated, some of the ordinary risks to life and limb could fade from concern a little. The name given in the official inscription is a Greek name, not Latin, and many would think of them under the names of three sister fates spoken of by the Greeks, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Hesiod, hundreds of years earlier, had said that even Zeus prudently showed them honor.
It must have been Ateius Capito, reading the Sibylline books, who found, with whatever encouragement from Augustus, the right sequence of goddesses and gods for the ludi to address. Here the choice evokes the fears of life and death, but in a far less blunt and desperate way than when Valesius came to the same site to propitiate directly the gods who already ruled over the world of death, Dis/Pluto and Proserpina. Perhaps we should trust Capito’s religious learning and his insight into the meaning of the sacred books or perhaps we should surmise Augustus had already given an indication of how he wanted to see this ritual unfold and how the turn from dark to light would be managed, beginning with propitiation of goddesses merely dubious rather than overtly hostile in their intent.
So it begins. Tethered and penned a few yards away from the torchlit altars were the nine female lambs and nine female goats who were to be sacrificed that evening. Each was brought forth singly, each dispatched with care and patience. Their deaths likely filled the eight or so night hours of darkness. As each was led forward, the celebrant (Augustus and Agrippa probably alternated) began by inviting the gods to attend, pouring a little incense and wine into a fire kindled at the beginning of the evening. Odors play a large part in these ceremonies, giving those at the front of the crowd a concrete sense of what was happening. As the first lamb came forward, the celebrant sprinkled a few grains from a dish along its back and sprinkled again a little water on its forehead. For this kind of public Roman ceremony, it was likely a mixture of salt and wheat grain that had been prepared in advance on specific days by the vestal virgins at their “house of Vesta” just off the Forum. (While there were always two vestals on duty at the house attending the fire, the other two or four would have been free to attend an event like this and likely did. They would have their own high holy days in the second week of June.) Then the celebrant nicked a few hairs from the victim’s head and burned them in the fire. This was how things went, the organizers would have said, in the “Greek rite.” That is, in what was called “Greek rite” at Rome, to give it a flavor of exotic mysticism perhaps and to distinguish from what was presented as the more native ceremony—to which the presiders would switch the next day in broad daylight. For now, Augustus and Agrippa were unveiled and crowned with laurel in that Greekish way.
Now for the killing.6 With sheep and goats, the method of choice was slitting the throat. (For cattle a clubbing first, right between the eyes, or a well-placed axe to the skull made the victim less dangerous to bystanders.) The animal was guided to the moment in a way meant to show acquiescence by the bowing of the head. This was, after all, how the gods wanted it. A victim who resisted was thought to be a bad omen. Blood was carefully drained away, but there’s no getting over the fact that this was now messy, smelly, and unpleasant business—palliated by dignity, fine clothing, formal language, and incense for the smell. The victim was laid out on its back and cut open by attendants who knew what they were doing and dressed for mess. (When the paterfamilias of a rustic household presided over family sacrifice, he did more of the dirty work himself.) An appropriate soothsayer, called a haruspex, was brought forward alongside the celebrant to inspect the condition of the victim’s entrails. When all was normal, that was a sign that the gods accepted this sacrifice. Abnormal, misshapen, or even missing organs meant divine disfavor; the offering was regarded as null and void and had to be done over. On many occasions, the haruspex was asked to examine certain organs (notably the liver) with particular care and to make prophecy for the future from them.
The internal organs were then cut out to be burned up completely on the altar. The meat was formally touched and lifted, at least symbolically, by Augustus or Agrippa, to signify that it was being reclaimed for human use, then grilled separately for sharing with the attending public. For a ritual like this, each animal would be taken through to butchery and the parts disposed for cooking, but the final sacrificial offering would be saved up until all the animals had been slaughtered.
One done, seventeen to go. Think a quarter to a half hour to take down each of them; think of the blood and the meat and the smells and the grills needed. We see now that this space had to be fairly considerable. I’ve seen goats for an open-air banquet on gridirons over open fire on the high plains of Algeria and remember the smoke, the smell, the gusts of heat, and then the greasy mess of plunging in to rip off chunks for eating. We modern tourists were less ritual-fastidious than the Romans, but the experience left a vivid impression.
As the night wore on and the eighteen were brought to their end, there came a moment for this formal prayer, taken from the ceremonial inscription that recorded the event.
[Augustus is speaking:] O Moerae! As it is set out for you in the books, so it is done. From this may every good fortune come to the Roman people, the Romulans (Quirites). Let sacrifice be done with nine ewes and nine she-goats. Just as you have strengthened the empire and majesty of the Romulans in peace and war, so by this sacrifice may the Latin peoples always be obedient. May the Roman people have eternal health, victory, and safety, the Romulans; protect them and their legions; be favorable to the Romulans, to the quindecemviri, to me, to my house and my household, and accept then this sacrifice of nine ewes and nine she-goats, all spotless and perfect for the sacrifice.
The eating will have gone likely through the night. In an event of this kind, the meat of eighteen animals could only have been shared out among a limited number of the dignitaries present. When there were more (or larger) animals and smaller crowds, the natural function of such events was to move from ritual and excitement through slaughter and cookery to feasting and frivolity. In this kind of state ritual, it would be the few elite who would perform that sequence on public view, to assure everyone that this sacrifice was real and authentic and rightly completed.
Dawn eventually washed the sky, and surely the principals disappeared into some shelter for clean clothes and a breather, because now came the first procession from the end of the city to its heart, from the Tarentum to the Capitol. The procession passed along by the temporary structures built for racing and shows, staying close to the river and keeping Pompey’s theater to the left. Then it entered the city’s formal center near its most ancient heart. We would guess that the celebrants and their attendants would pass the Capitoline and then pass along under the brow of the Palatine Hill, glancing up at Augustus’s temples decked for the day as the sun’s light began to peek over the ridge. They would circle left then between Palatine and Caelian, and left again along the via sacra, the “sacred way” that led down into the Forum. As they made that turn, they passed the place where Nero would eventually build his vast “golden house,” the Domus Aurea, and his successors would build the Flavian amphitheater we call the Colosseum. In passing this way, they would have followed with a few differences the route that ancient generals took to make their formal approach to the city for a triumph. One of Augustus’s sly tricks was to do things that made him appear in people’s eyes to be even more dignified than he was, and to call no attention to them.
The Capitoline’s ancient configuration is best seen today from the Forum, to which the procession moved. The last stretch of ascent took the procession up some thirty meters or so above the level of the Forum, to the recently rebuilt great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, the site where the cackling geese had, according to the story, awakened defenders and prevented a night attack by the Gauls in 390 BCE. In the forecourt of the great temple came the next sacrifices. Today, the first day of June, there would be two great bulls sacrificed to “Jupiter, the Best, the Greatest” (Iupiter Optimus Maximus), one each by Augustus and by Agrippa. The fundamental ritual of words, a sprinkling (perhaps now with wine if we have shifted from the “Greek” rite to the Roman), then the more dramatically brutal business of killing a bull: stunning, jugulating, draining, opening, examining, butchering, barbecuing, dining. It was probably here on the first day that the ritual banquet of the gods themselves was performed, with couches (now inside the temple, seen only by a relative few?), upon each of which an appropriate cult image of a senior god sat; plates presented and taken away; and a larger meal for the human participants. Bulls—huge, immaculately white bulls, appropriate for gods of the sky and light—were a tougher business to get through this way than sheep and goats, but this ritual would only have taken some of the morning. With these duties accomplished, I imagine Augustus and Agrippa slipping away to the Palatine for a few hours’ rest, while the crowds would now swarm to the riverbank again for a day of shows, racing, and what we would recognize as festival. No one would be surprised if there were a crowd there already, gathering since before dawn to get the good places and not entirely enthralled with the sacrificial rituals that, after all, most people could not get near. A long afternoon holiday, with many events and much hilarity would follow.
The second night, Augustus and Agrippa would appear again at the Tarentum altars, but now for a much more sedate set of ceremonies. Instead of beasts and blood, the sacrificial objects were specially made cakes, twenty-seven of them, nine each of three unique creations. A recipe for one kind we can find in old Cato’s book of agriculture from a hundred fifty years before: “Crush two pounds of cheese in a mixing bowl; when that is thoroughly mashed, add a pound of wheat flour or, if you want cake to be lighter, just half a pound of wheat flour and mix thoroughly with the cheese. Add one egg and mix together well. Make it into a loaf, place it on leaves and bake slowly on a warm hearth under a crock.” Asiago ciabatta, you might think.7
The goddesses of this night were the Ilythiae, again Greek named, the goddesses of childbirth. In Latin they would be called Carmentes, a little committee of divine attendants who would stir around the childbed to see an infant into the world nursed and nurtured appropriately. The experience of childbirth was terrifying and dangerous for any woman in antiquity, so keeping those godlets well disposed was worth a sacrifice or two. Would Augustus’s heavily pregnant daughter, Julia, have been carried out to the end of town in a sedan chair to observe and, gods willing, be blessed by this propitiation? Her stepmother, Livia, may have been there as well, watching with mixed emotions.
What whooping and hollering and conviviality carried itself on into the night, around the fairgrounds or back in the neighborhoods of the city, we do not know. Romans were wary enough of the night to call its dead time after midnight “unseasonable” (intempesta), but surely these nights were special. Dignitaries and senators were likely enough engaged in temperate private celebrations and early enough to bed.
The next morning belonged to Juno. As her frenemy, brother, and husband, Jupiter, had received two bulls in sacrifice the day before, so would she receive two cows on the second full day, again on the Capitoline at the same site as before, where she had her own cell in Jupiter’s great temple and where the forecourt was still set for pageantry. Again Augustus and Agrippa took turns. Women will have been more prominently on display and had roles to play in the ceremony, but the killing and butchering were still men’s work. These proceedings ended with a supplicatio, a particular ceremony of prayer and hymns for divine favor, here performed by and on behalf of the married women of the city, for whom Juno was the special patron and protector. The women’s version of the divine banquet, the sellisternia, was set out now back at the fairgrounds, a first great event for that day of games and shows. This one was hosted by 110 matrons who had been selected by the quindecemviri for this special honor.8
Without the texture of small events—the individual performers, the colorful costumes, the flavor of the food for sale—this all seems routine. You really had to be there, caught up in the spirit of festival, frolic mixing with formality, crowds, smells, and excitement—excitement arising from the expectation of excitement.
On the third night came the goddess Terra Mater (“Earth Mother”). Nothing wrong with that choice, but once again the goddesses of the night this week were figures of lower status. The Magna Mater, Greek Cybele, the “Great Mother,” had been imported from Asia Minor with great ceremony during the second Punic war two hundred years before, the object of scandalous rituals and the affections of castrated followers. That’s not who was invoked for these purposes. Under the name Terra Mater, devotees would have sought the favors of a goddess much tamer, much less a celebrity, but by her name a generous nurturer of lands and crops. The fears set for calming by three nights of sacrifice—fate, childbirth, fertility—were deep ones, the placation important, but the charge, the buzz, the excitement, the link to mythology and a sense of really volatile power was—likely deliberately—defused behind these calmer rituals. She, Terra Mater, received now only a pregnant sow as her sacrificial victim, back at the original site.
The last day was special.
The focus shifted from Tarentum and the Capitol initially to a place that would not have come to mind as recently as twenty years earlier. The Palatine Hill frames the south side of the Roman Forum as the Capitoline does the west. Where the Capitol had been the place of temples and the Forum the place of business, traditional Palatine life had been residential. The other hills, to north and east, were for the larger population, even if interspersed with a few mansions on choice sites. The Palatine was Augustus’s choice and he seized upon this second eminence of the city (not really higher than the other hills, but closest to the river and thus making for a dramatic presence) and made it his own, filling its heights with a mix of new and old construction for his own compound. We get our English word palace from what he did there, and the site would remain the home of emperors when at Rome for as long as there were emperors to reside or at least visit there; that is, for another five hundred years or more. The Circus Maximus lies at the foot of the Palatine on the river side and as the craze for horse races grew and the facilities of the Circus were elaborated, so it became convenient for the emperor to have his own “box”—really more like a modern plutocrat’s “sky box”—poised at the edge of the hill, with a view from which to see and be seen.
Pious Augustus bolstered his authority by bringing with him to the Palatine his favorite god, Apollo. Apollo, Greek by origin but entirely Roman in acculturation, the only one of the great gods known by the same name in both languages, had many roles. He brought death and life with plague and medicine, he enlightened and delighted with poetry and the arts, he was a god of truth and voice of many oracles—notably the greatest one at Delphi—and he rode the great gleaming chariot of the sun in the sky. Like all such divine beings, he was terrifying, but Augustus could tame him and share his glory.
Augustus picked a site for him that Apollo himself had marked—by sending a thunderbolt that struck just there. In thanksgiving for victories and especially for the ultimate victory at Actium, Augustus built Apollo his own temple on the crest of the Palatine and dedicated it in 28 BCE. The chariot of the sun could be seen atop it, and inside was a radiant cult statue of the god. Probably half the size of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, it faced the southern sky through which the sun’s chariot passed, and consciously did not compete for visibility with the homes of the more senior gods. The temple itself, a public place and property, was at the same time part of the house of the first citizen, Augustus, and Apollo was in some special way the household god of the family. It’s unlikely Augustus could have said something so astonishingly presumptuous as that, but if others drew that conclusion, he might not resist it. Here the Sibylline books would reside, and so it was not a work of unusual spiritual perspicacity if Ateius Capito suggested that the culminating day of the games of the century should start here.
For the day, Apollo would be joined by his sister Diana—Artemis, as she was known in Greek. Diana was the goddess of the wild powers of the world, of animals and the moon, the space beyond civilization. Unapproachable virgin, she looked after women in childbirth. At Rome she had her own temple on the Aventine hill outside the pomerium, so she was able to retain her status as outsider, of but not in the city. Her true home was a shrine at Aricia on the Alban Lake about fifteen miles southeast of the city, early home to Aeneas. Every divinity partook of the eerie, but Diana was always specially elusive and remote and for as long as people cared about her, she always escaped domestication.
Now she came to join her brother on the Palatine, where they jointly received sacrifice at his temple: again, the twenty-seven cakes, surrounded in the sunlight of morning with all the pageantry of the day. The modern equivalent that comes to mind is the radiant day of song and community that concludes Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which is best performed on a stage lit almost too brightly for the eye to bear. Where the second day had followed sacrifice with formal supplication, this day had something even more special in reserve—a hymn for the day by the reigning poet of Rome, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Horace, as we call him. Since Vergil had died two years earlier and the younger Ovid was still a figure of promise, Horace was the master poet of the hour. We have the unambiguous record of that public inscription that he provided the official hymn of this last day of the festival, a “song of the century,” or Carmen saeculare. It was to be sung by a chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls, all unblemished, none pubescent, all with both parents still alive (a sign of divine favor).
The poem survives. Simple enough, certainly, to ask fifty-four chosen young people to memorize seventy-six lines of poetry and even learn to chant them back with grace and feeling. Touching enough to imagine their 108 living parents standing by with pride on one side while Augustus and Agrippa and the others of the quindecemviri preside. The performance was out of doors in a space with no good acoustics. Today’s traffic noise and aircraft overhead, at least, would not intrude, but what must be seen is the performance, not the comprehension. Many people would have been in attendance, but few could reasonably have heard what high, thin voices said or sang into whatever spring breezes wafted and over whatever mild restlessness of a crowd or distant buzz of movement was heard from beyond the circle of participants. The metrical and syntactical demands of the Sapphic stanza, moreover, create a flow of words that is not always instantly easy to grasp at first hearing.
Celebrating celebration, the Carmen saeculare was a poem to be recited at the games of the century about the games of the century.
O Phoebus and Diana who rule the woods,
Shining glory of the sky, always venerable and venerated,
Grant our prayer in this sacred time,
When Sibylline verses bid us,
Chosen maidens and chaste boys,
To tell a song to the gods who are pleased by the seven hills.9
Gentle Sun, who show us the day in a shining car
And hide it, then are born again new and the same,
May you gaze on nothing grander than the city of Rome.
Kindly, Ilithyia, watch over mothers
Bearing children at full term,
Whether you’d rather be called Lucina
or Genitalis.
The poem goes on to recapitulate the setting, of games mounted every hundred years, three days and nights of song and celebration. The fates are named here “Parcae” in the Latin way, Terra Mater is “Tellus.”
The poem goes on to recapitulate the setting of games, the city’s role as successor of Troy and Aeneas’s heroism and now as lord of a world reaching to the Indies in a time of peace and plenty and (especially) virtue. Apollo is the healer here, preserving all for the future, Diana a friendly patroness for what children or fifteen men may ask of her.
I bring home good and certain hope
That Jupiter and all the gods will hear,
For our chorus has learned from Apollo and Diana
To say their praises.
Surely the children’s song was well received—and then repeated. For the procession of dignitaries and choristers moved at the very end of the ceremonies back to the grandest of its sites, atop the Capitoline, and the children sang their song again.
The song comes closest of anything to showing us the gods, but still we cannot see them. Prayer and song addressed them as beings present and listening, but how it felt to feel that presence—that we cannot feel. Outside of myth, the gods are always that kind of elusive.
With the second singing of the Carmen, the rituals ended. The sacrificing was done, but the partying continued. From the fifth to the eleventh of the month, Greek and Latin plays continued on display, and then on the twelfth a day of chariot racing and hunting shows featuring doomed animals and doubtless very bad acting by those portraying the hunters, all still as specified by the quindecemviri.
Games of the century occurred again later no fewer than five times. One school of thought evidently regarded the postponement of the games from the 40s to the year 17 to have been an irregularity, so the emperor Claudius mounted the games in 47 CE on the original schedule, while the emperor Domitian welcomed the opportunity to sponsor them on a schedule in line with Augustus’s date in the year 88. Following Claudius, similar games were staged in 148 and 248, by now consolidating “games of the century” with celebration of what were the 900th and 1000th anniversaries of the traditional date of the founding of the city of Rome in 753 BCE. But with no sense of inconsistency, the emperor Septimius Severus also arranged ludi saeculares for the year 204. The first lapses occurred under emperors who were themselves Christian, Constantine neglecting the Domitian-Severus sequence in about 313 and his son Constantius omitting the anniversarial date in 348. Around the year 500, in the unmistakably, heavily imperial city of Constantinople, a state official named Zosimus, of high but not the highest rank, wrote a “New History” of Rome’s empire from Augustus forward and made much of the ludi saeculares, even offering us a Greek text of the Sibyl’s oracle.10 Augustus’s reinvention of the past became the solemn past.
It’s still common to say that Augustus worked hard to revive a Roman religious culture that had fallen on hard times, but nothing suggests there had been any outsized lapse in religious belief, practice, or assiduousness in the decades before Augustus. When the temple of Jupiter had been destroyed by fire, the concern to rebuild it and manage appropriate rituals was quite direct and effective. The single most notable gap in recorded religious behavior was a long lapse in the office of flamen dialis (“Jupiter’s priest,” roughly) vacant since 87, filled by Augustus in 11 BCE. Jupiter’s highest priest, this official lived with traditional restrictions of a sort to make the office almost as inconvenient as that of the vestals. He could never spend a night outside the ancient pomerium of the city, nor be away from his own house for more than two nights. He could not touch iron, ride or even touch a horse, or look at a dead body. His clothing was prescribed and oddly archaic, his diet restricted. It is hardly surprising that such an office would be increasingly unwelcome to those of lofty enough family to hold it, and there had evidently grown up a set of “workarounds” to allow the sacrificial duties to Jupiter to be carried out during an extended vacancy. We do not need to regard that vacancy, in other words, as a sign of irreligion or neglect. If the likeliest date for the filling of the office by Augustus is 11 BCE (there’s a variant tradition about the date in Tacitus), then it’s a reminder that for the last thirty years of the lapse, the office was probably under the authority of the absent and marginalized pontifex maximus, the triumvir Lepidus. His absence and inactivity, even more so, had nothing to do with disrespect for religion and everything to do with ordinary surly politics. It seems likeliest that when he died and Augustus could assume the pontifex maximus role, then finding a flamen dialis was easier. (Augustus institutionalized some concessions for him to make the office less annoying.) Pushing religion was good politics for Augustus, but there’s nothing to say it needed pushing.