The Saeculum. 147
He promptly died, confirming the Etruscan definition of saeculum:“he died
because he was the last member of his generation, of the past saeculum.”^62 A ninth
saeculumending in 44 does not consort with an eighth ending in 88, and it is clear
that the Etruscan experts, like all such, were adept at juggling their frames to suit
the contemporary demands.^63 Varro, as we have already seen, showed an interest
in the Etruscan saecula,transmitting to us, via Censorinus, the ten-saeculaformat
(DN17.6). He was able to adapt the scheme to Roman needs as well. Censorinus
relates from Varro’s Antiquitatesthe engaging story in which Varro tells how he
heard one Vettius, an expert in augury, interpret the twelve vultures of Romulus
according to a secular formula (DN17.15): the vultures cannot have stood for
decades, since the Roman people had safely got past the 120-year milestone, so
they must have symbolized centuries, guaranteeing 1,200 years for Rome from the
time of Romulus’s foundation.^64
The Roman state institutionalized the saeculumin the ceremony of the Ludi
Saeculares, a religious ritual that marked the end of one saeculumand the begin-
ning of the next.^65 The Ludi Saeculares are a most impressive and subtle tool for
working with time, focusing on the discrepancy between the life span of the indi-
vidual and of the community, between “natural” and “civil” time, as Varro would
put it: even though the longest-lived individual in the city may see only one cele-
bration of the Ludi, the state still continues, outstripping the fate of the singletons
who make up the collective.^66 The rite, at least in its Augustan incarnation, the only
one for which we have adequate evidence, provides a pivot for looking backwards
and forwards in time, invoking the gods to help the city in the future, as they have
in the past. It is a symbolic rupture of great power when the first Christian emperor
breaks this continuity and refrains from celebrating the Ludi Saeculares on sched-
ule in 314 c.e.^67 The new dispensation would have its own way of ensuring that it
endured per saecula saeculorum.
All of these schemes — eras, millennial and centennial anniversaries, epochs and
saecula— are attempts to impose meaningful shape on the flux of past time, and
to create a sensation of monitored progress through time. They are of particular
importance in a setting where there was no one common grid of chronology, but a
medley of diverse tools for orientation in time. Patterns were not picked out of a
preexisting frame of decades and centuries grounded on an unshakable foundation,
as may so readily be done now, but manufactured anew on many occasions. It is
perhaps easy to regard the various calculations with condescension as misguided
numerology, and to patronize the attempts to seek significance in what are after all