The Etruscan saecula: the lifespan of peoples measured by portents

Among the most original doctrines of the Etrusca disciplina is that of the saecula. The Etruscans believed that the lives of individuals, cities and peoples had limits set by the gods, and that historical time was divided into ages of varying length. The end of each one was announced by extraordinary signs, which the haruspices had the task of recognising and explaining to the community.

How an age was measured

The main source is the grammarian Censorinus, who in AD 238 wrote the treatise De die natali and summarised in it doctrines drawn largely from Varro. According to this account, the first saeculum of a city began on the day of its foundation and ended with the death of the longest-lived person among those born on that day. The second was measured in the same way, starting from the end of the first, and so on for those that followed.

It was therefore not a fixed measure of a hundred years, like our century. The Etruscan saeculum coincided with the maximum length of a human life and could vary considerably. Since people were unable to establish exactly when the last witness of an age had died, it was believed that the gods sent portents to signal its end and the beginning of the next.

Ten ages for the Etruscan people

Censorinus reports, again on the basis of Varro, that the Etruscan histories stated that ten saecula had been allotted to their people. Those histories, he explains, had been written during the eighth; the ninth and tenth therefore remained, and when they were over the Etruscan name would come to an end. In this view the destiny of a nation was already written, and its end was not an unforeseen event but the fulfilment of an appointed term.

Plutarch, in his Life of Sulla, tells of an episode in 88 BC. From a clear sky came the sound of a trumpet, shrill and mournful, which terrified everyone. The Etruscan seers declared that the portent announced the passage to a new age. Plutarch reports their doctrine in a slightly different form: there were eight ages of humankind, each with its own customs and ways of life, and the god signalled each change with a sign.

The comet of 44 BC

The most famous episode concerns the comet that appeared in 44 BC, during the games organised by Octavian in honour of Caesar. According to the Virgilian commentator Servius, a haruspex named Vulcanius declared in a public assembly that the comet marked the end of the ninth saeculum and the beginning of the tenth. He added that, having revealed this secret against the will of the gods, he would die at once, and the story has it that he collapsed before finishing his speech.

Vulcanius's calculation thus placed the Etruscan people in the last age of its history. A few decades later Etruscan civilisation had been absorbed into Roman civilisation and its language was disappearing. The comet, called the sidus Iulium, was read instead by Octavian's propaganda as a sign of Caesar's ascent among the gods, and it long appeared on his coins.

The Romans had their own celebration of the passage from one age to another, the ludi saeculares, whose origin is debated but which some ancient writers connected with doctrines of this kind. Augustus celebrated them in 17 BC, and Horace composed the Carmen saeculare for the occasion. In those ceremonies the ancient conviction that time has a rhythm set by the gods lived on in transformed form.