The Politics of Religion in the Secular Games of Emperor Augustus

The biggest Roman religious festival, the Secular Games (which were meant to take place once in one’s lifetime, or a “century”: saeculum), were first held by the emperor Augustus in 17 BCE. These Games, which lasted for three nights and days and included many sacrifices to various deities together with numerous purification and propitiation rites, have received noticeable attention in studies on Roman religion. There is no reason to doubt the religious importance of the Games (Potter 1994; Schnegg-Köhler 2002; Price 2012), which, as I show, reinforced the Augustan policy of concealing his new political and cultural program under the guise of Roman traditionalism.

My presentation combines textual references with visual imagery, contextualizing them both diachronically, by tracing the roots of the Games’ various components into the Roman past, and synchronically, by analyzing them together with written and visual evidence for Augustan policies in other fields. The diachronic approach reveals that Augustus borrowed all the elements of his Games from the past while adjusting them in various ways. The purifying processions of the 27 singing maidens are well attested in the Roman republic, but Augustus added an equal number of noble boys, so that his Games simultaneously employed two choirs of the same size. Religious banquets (sellisternia) by Roman matrons dated back to at least the fourth century BCE (Scheid 2003; Šterbenc Erker 2018), but the Augustan Games put the number of the matrons who held such banquets at 110, with a clear reference to the 110-year-long Etruscan saeculum (Briquel 1990; Santangelo 2013). The official hymn of the Augustan Games, Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, had its predecessors in the carmina specifically composed for purifying ceremonies performed by 27 maidens (Schnegg 2020), but Horace’s Carmen was performed twice in 17 BCE — not just on the Capitol, but also on the Palatine (the place of Augustus’ residence)—and by both maidens and boys.

Synchronously contextualizing literary and numismatic evidence about Augustus’ Secular Games within his overall social and religious policy reveals not only the ways in which Augustus packed his festival with traditional Roman rites, but also the reasons why he gave them all a new meaning. When examined against the images on the panels of Augustus’ Altar of Peace (Zanker 1988; Simon 2010), his legislation on morality and family life (McGinn 2008; Grubbs 2019), and his policy of religious syncretism (Cooley 2006; Rüpke 2012), the Secular Games of 17 BCE appear to have conveyed the same messages of the revival of the glorious past, the unity of diverse social and ethnic groups led by the benevolent leader with the gods’ favor, and the prospect of the secure future under the guidance of the Julian family, whose scions would continue to rule Rome for centuries. Just like Augustus’ monuments and laws, his Secular Games packaged the political and social agenda of his newly established empire as the restoration of the traditional Roman moral and religious values.