This grand wisdom of the Etruscans, which looked beyond the limits of human life, made a profound impression on their pupils, the Romans, and was transferred to Rome with the rest of the augural discipline. The family of the Valerii is said to have been the one to introduce this cult into Rome, for themselves alone in the first instance, and not as yet in the name of the state. One of the ancestors of this family, it was said, had come to Rome from his home in the land of the Sabines to propitiate the evil omens which disturbed him there. He came down the Tiber with his sick children till he reached the vicinity of Rome, and there, where the Field of Mars is narrowest, near the bank of the Tiber, was formerly a spot noted for volcanic phenomena, hot springs, and subterranean fire--the so-called Tarentum. The sick children were cured by the water of the neighbouring spring, and twenty feet below the surface of the ground the father found a primitive altar to the infernal gods, to whom he gave thanks for the miraculous cure by sacrifices, games, and _lectisternia_. A descendant of his is said to have been one P. Valerius Publicola, who, as consul in the first year of the republic (509) repeated these games of his family cult in the name and for the welfare of the state of Rome. It was essential to the secular theory of later generations that so important an epoch as the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the republic should have been marked by public secular games. The next secular games were also said to have been celebrated by another Valerius, who was consul in the year 449, after the fall of the decemvirs; and about a hundred years later the third secular games had to be celebrated, which, according to the records of the quindecemviri, was again done by a consul of the house of the Valerii in the year 346, though no one else knows anything about such a celebration and it was not counted in the series of republican secular games. For according to Valerius Antias, the third secular games were celebrated in the year 249, at the time of the First Punic War; and the fourth--whether they were held in the year 149 or 146--mark the end of that memorable period. For a theory had taken shape among Roman antiquaries and historical students, of whose number was even a man of the erudition of Varro, that the seculum must always be a hundred years long, and for the sake of this theory the games, which on contemporary authority were held in the year 146, were put three years earlier. A hundred years later Varro’s authority on all such matters was at its zenith, and it sufficed to fix the next celebration for the year 49. “But instead of the celebration came the end; for this was the year at the beginning of which Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, and with that began the mortal agony of the republic. What commenced was not a new seculum for the republic, but a new order of things.” (Mommsen in _Die Nation_, 1891.)