The civil wars which ensued and seemed to develop one out of another in endless sequence, might, perhaps, have stifled the hope of peace in Italy, but not the longing for it. An iron age had dawned instead of the golden. The dictator did in truth seem to succeed in exorcising the demons of discord and discontent. But this hope proved illusory on the ides of March. Soon afterwards the star of the Julii was seen at Rome, and seemed, as was at first hoped, to be the long-desired divine token that was to inaugurate a better time. An Etruscan _haruspex_ proclaimed to the assembled people that the ninth seculum (according to the Etruscans) was coming to an end and the tenth beginning. But the augur died immediately after; a sign that his words were not indeed false but premature, according to the will of the gods. Nowhere did any likelihood of permanent amelioration present itself, but the yearning remained and hardly ever found stronger expression than in the wretched years that followed the murder of Cæsar. It was strengthened by Sibylline oracles, which were privately circulated and kept faith in the happy future alive. Since the oracle could not lie, it was, perhaps, nothing but miscalculations and vain hopes of men, in the year 49, which had anticipated too soon the dawn of a new age; and perhaps the seculum should be reckoned at 110 years and not 100--it takes but little to revive hope. In the year 43 no less a person than Varro announced to the anxious world of his day that this was the correct estimate; 440 years after the first celebration the fourth Roman seculum was declining to its close, and then a new birth would usher in the new age. But Rome still hoped in vain. Misery increased, and with it the excitement spread into the widest circles. In the year 40 Asinius Pollio was consul, a man of honourable character and highly educated, who endeavoured to avoid the arbitrary usurpations of other rulers. In the circumstances of the time, not the boldest imagination ventured to dream that he might bring back the golden age. But Asinius was at that time expecting the birth of a son; perhaps this son was destined by fate to do so; and a contemporary poet greets the coming deliverer with the most ardent longings. In later days Virgil, with better reasons, fixed his hopes and desires upon the emperor. The opportunity of holding secular games in the latter half of the last century before Christ had thus passed by unused, and it was a very difficult matter to prove that Augustus was entitled to hold such a celebration. This hard and thankless task fell to the share of the famous jurist Ateius Capito, who acquitted himself skilfully enough to make the will of his master possible in theory. The chronology of Roman history has suffered violence at many hands before and after the time of Ateius Capito, but hardly ever more than at the time of the secular games of Augustus.