Calendrical Notes

[Clavdivs]

To-day is the sixteenth day before the Kalends of February (ANTE DIEM XVII KALENDAS FEBRVARII), according to modern reckoning the seventeenth day of the month. To-day is marked C., or DIES COMITIALIS.

We possess a fragmentary historical note, fortunately not so mutilated as to prevent reconstruction:

''Business in Assembly. The pontifices, [the augurs, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, and the septemviri] epulonum sacrificed victims to the [the godhead of Augustus at the altar] which Tiberius Caesar dedicated.''

The date is in or after 14 C.E., for the God Augustus was deified in the year of his death. At the present (although this is due more to the lateness of the hour and the tiredness of the author than for want of searching) I am not altogether sure which altar is referred to -- it cannot possibly be that of the AEDES DIVI AVGVSTI, for that was dedicated by Caligula (Suet. Calig. Chapter 21):

''He completed the public works which had been half finished under Tiberius, namely the temple of Augustus and the theatre of Pompey.''

The QVINDECIMVIRI SACRIS FACIVNDIS or the QVINDECIMVIRI SACRORVM were the fifteen members of the last of the four priestly colleges, whose duty was to safeguard and interpret the Sybilline Books. For their origin, see the sixty-second chapter of the fourth book of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus:

''Tarquinius chose two men of distinction from among the citizens and appointing two public slaves to assist them, entrusted to them the guarding of the books; and when one of these men, named Marcus Atilius, seemed to have been faithless to his trust and was informed upon by one of the public slaves, he ordered him to be sewed up in a leather bag and thrown into the sea as a parricide. Since the expulsion of the kings, the commonwealth, taking upon itself the guarding of these oracles, entrusts the care of them to persons of the greatest distinction, who hold this office for life, being exempt from military service and from all civil employments, and it assigns public slaves to assist them, in whose absence the others are not permitted to inspect the oracles. In short, there is no possession of the Romans, sacred or profane, which they guard so carefully as they do the Sibylline oracles. They consult them, by order of the senate, when the state is in the grip of party strife or some great misfortune has happened to them in war, or some important prodigies and apparitions have been seen which are difficult of interpretation, as has often happened''

In the year 367 B.C.E., of the City 387, L. Sextius Lateranus and C. Licinius Stolo, tribunes of the plebs, proposed a fourth LEX LICINIA SEXTIA [the LEGES LICINIAE SEXTIAE were bitterly controversial during the Conflict of the Orders], increasing the duumvirs to ten and making five plebeians, as we find in the thirty-sixth chapter of the sixth book of Livy's Roman History:

''they brought forward a fresh proposal, viz. that instead of the duumviri (the two keepers of the Sacred Books) a College of Ten should be formed, half of them plebeians and half patricians''

Subsequently the number was increased still further to fifteen, likely by L. Cornelius Sulla the Dictator, and certainly by the time of Cicero.

Julius Caesar added a sixteenth, for which see Cassius Dio, Book 42 Chapter 51, but this seems to have been an increase of but short duration:

''Indeed, in order to reward a larger number, he appointed ten praetors for the next year and more than the customary number of priests; for he added one member each to the pontifices and to the augurs, of whom he was one, and also to the Quindecemviri,as they were called, although he had desired to take all the priesthoods himself, as had been decreed.''

The Quindecemviri were ex officio priests of Apollo, as the god of the Sibylline prophecies, and celebrated both the Secular Games and those in honour of their patron god. Each quindecemvir had in his house a tripod of bronze dedicated to Apollo.

Of the death and deification of Augustus, see the Vita Divi Avgvsti by Suetonius, chapter 95:

''His death, too, of which I shall speak next, and his deification after death, were known in advance by unmistakable signs. As he was bringing the lustrum [i.e. a purificatory SVOVETAVRILIA, or sacrifice of pig, ram and bull, according to a very ancient rite and carried out by the Censor every five years] to an end in the Campus Martius before a great throng of people, an eagle flew several times about him and then going across to the temple hard by, perched above the first letter of Agrippa's name. On noticing this, Augustus bade his colleague recite the vows which it is usual to offer for the next five years for although he had them prepared and written out on a tablet, he declared that he would not be responsible for vows which he should never pay. At about the same time the first letter of his name was melted from the inscription on one of his statues by a flash of lightning; this was interpreted to mean that he would live only a hundred days from that time, the number indicated by the letter C, and that he would be numbered with the gods, since aesar (that is, the part of the name Caesar which was left) is the word for god in the Etruscan tongue.''