in their religion—the time of their festivals. Censorinus says,[1] “How many ages are due unto the city of Rome, it is not mine to say; but what I have read in Varro, that will I not withhold. He saith in the 18th book of his antiquities, that there was one Vettius, a distinguished Augur at Rome, of great genius, and equal to any man in learned disputations; and that he heard Vettius say, that if that was true which historians related, concerning the auguries of Romulus the founder, and concerning the twelve Vultures, then, as the Roman people had safely passed over their 120th year, they would last unto the 1200th.”[2] I construe this to mean, that the Vultures had relation to two cycles of 60 years each, or to the two of 600 each; and, as time had shewn that it did not relate to the former, it must relate to the latter. Rome was to finish with the 1200th year, because the world was then to end, as was supposed by the priests, who did not understand their mythology.
But besides the period announced by their twelve Vultures, the Etruscans had also another ill-understood system of ten ages, which was the system common to the Hindoos, the Jews, and the Romans, and this fact adds one more to the numerous proofs of the identity of the two races.
5. Plutarch in Sylla has stated, that on a certain clear and serene day, a trumpet was heard to sound which was so loud and clear, that all the world was struck with fear. On the priests of Etruria being consulted they declared, that a new age was about to commence, and a new race of people to arise,—that there had been eight races of people, different in their lives and manners,—that God has allotted to each race a fixed period, which is called the great year,—that when one period is about to end and another to begin, the heaven or the earth marks it by some great prodigy. The author of Nimrod[3] observes, that Plutarch gives the account loosely and mistakes the age then ending, the eighth, for the ultima ætas; for the correction of which we are indebted to the invaluable treatise of Censorinus. This ultima ætas was the same as the Ultima Ætas Cumæi Carminis of Virgil, which I believe meant, not the last age of the world, but the latter part of the age or cycle sung of by the prophetess of Cuma,—as we should say, the last end of the cycle of the Cumæan Sibyl had arrived. If it be supposed to allude to the periods of 120 years, I ask, how is it possible to believe the Romans could be such idiots as to fancy that new Troys, Argonauts, &c., would arise every 120 years? But I shall return to this again.
Although a certain great year was well known to the Romans, yet the nature of it seems, in the latter times of the commonwealth, to have been lost.[4] The end of one of these great years, and the beginning of another, were celebrated with games called Ludi Sæculares. They were solemnized in the time of Sylla, when the ninth age was said to have commenced by his supporters, probably for the sake of flattering him with being the distinguished person foretold. Nimrod says “Sylla was born in the year of Rome, 616,[5] but it is uncertain in what year the Sæcular games were celebrated, whether in 605, in 608, or in 628. It was a matter of the most occult science and pontifical investigation to pronounce on what year each sæculum ended, and I am not satisfied whether the Quindecemviri did not publish the games more than once, when they saw reason to doubt which was the true Sibylline year. It was not fixed by law or custom to be an unvarying cycle of 110 years,
Orbis,
till after the games held by Augustus; if even then.”[6]
