tianity produced many variations of significant multiples of the talismanic
“1,000.”^47 Other groupings of units of one hundred were also popular in con-
structing pre-Christian anniversaries. Claudius celebrated games in 47 c.e.to mark
the 800th anniversary of the city’s foundation, and Antoninus Pius celebrated the
900th anniversary in 147 c.e.^48 It is just about possible that contemporaries descried
the same significance in the year 117 c.e.as Syme, who calculates 1,300 years from
the fall of Troy to this portentous year, the year of Hadrian’s accession.^49
As these examples show, the century of one hundred years was a crucial link in
the chains of significance that were forged between past and present. Sometimes
the bare century carried its own symbolic power.^50 The African fate of the Scipios
is a probable example: P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus conquered Car-
thage in 146 b.c.e., while another Scipio, Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, was de-
feated in Libya by Caesar in the civil wars exactly one hundred years later.^51 In 44
b.c.e.Caesar started to rebuild Carthage as a Roman colony, and likewise Corinth,
which had been destroyed along with Carthage in 146 b.c.e.; Diodorus Siculus
comments that Corinth’s rebuilding took place “nearly one hundred years” after
its destruction (32.27.1 – 3), and Dio Cassius reports that Caesar deliberately
planned the simultaneous rebuilding of the cities that had been simultaneously
destroyed (43.50.4 – 51.1). The one hundred years could be further broken down,
for anniversaries of imperial accession and so on, into tens and fives.^52
THE SAECULUM
We are all very familiar with the century in our own experience, and it is decep-
tively easy to read our century into the Roman time unit of the saeculum.Eventu-
ally the saeculumdid come regularly to denote our “century” of one hundred
years, but originally and for long it did not have this sole meaning.^53 Even when it
did, it referred not to a preexisting grid of time but was used as part of the inter-
val-spacing era mentality, being mobilized from any ad hoc point of departure.
Rather than a “century” in the modern sense, then, saeculumdenoted a “genera-
tion,” particularly a generation measured as the life span of the longest-lived indi-
vidual in the community.^54 Accordingly, as is pointed out by our best source,
Censorinus, mediating Varro, the actual span of a Roman saeculumis elastic (modus
Romani saeculi est incertus, DN17.7), even though the Roman state has fixed the
saeculumat one hundred years (17.13). Censorinus is here working from the nor-
mal Varronian distinction between the “civil” and the “natural” (17.1).^55 This dis-
tinction, as usual, cannot escape deconstruction for very long. Censorinus links the
The Saeculum. 145