1 Earliest Rome

5.7 The games
3. Sacred scribe (hierogrammateus), widi a plumed headdress and carrying writing
materials.
4. Woman, with a serpent entwined around her arm and carrying a water holder {situld).
5.7 The games
Games (ludi) — whether horse and chariot racing {ludi circenses) or theatrical
displays {ludi scaenici) — were an important element in Roman religious ritual.
Some of the regular festivals included them as one part of their programme of
celebration: the festival of Dca Dia in the Arval Grove, for example, regularly
finished with chariot racing (see 4.5). In other festivals the games were (or gradually
became) the central focus of ritual activity: the Megalesian Games {ludi
Megalenses), for example, in honour of Magna Mater were best known for their
dramatic performances (at which some of the surviving Roman comedies by
Plautus and Terence were originally performed); the ludi Romani (or ludimagni
- the 'Great Games') in honour of Jupiter Optimus Maximus were famous for
their chariot racing in the Circus Maximus. It is perhaps not surprising that the
games were an increasingly popular form of celebration — so that by the first
century A.D. there were over sixty days marked specifically in the calendar as
regular ludi, in addition to such celebrations which might occasionally be
declared for special occasions (to mark, for example, military victory).
See further: Vol. 1, 40-1, 65-7, 201-6; Piganiol (1923); Balsdon (1969)
245-8*; Clavel -Leveque (1984); (1986); Dupont (1992) 207-9*.
5.7a The procession at the Roman Games (ludi Romani)
The ludi Romani had become an annual event by the middle of the fourth century
B.C.; originally a single day's celebration regularly held on the anniversary
of the foundation of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (13
September), by the reign of Augustus they extended over half the month of
September — with theatrical shows, as well as various types of horse and chariot
racing.
In this passage Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the procession that preceded
the games. But he also has his own partisan point to argue - namely that
the details of this procession help to prove that Rome was originally a Greek
city, founded by Greek colonists. It is to support this argument (and, in particular,
to meet the objection that the Greek features of the games were late
introductions, following Rome's conquest of Greece) that he claims the most
ancient possible authority for his account of the ritual: just before the start of
this extract, he says that he has based his description not on his own observations
of procedure in his own time, but on the work of Fabius Pictor, the earliest
Roman historian, writing around 200 B.C. about the first celebration of the
games in the fifth century B.C.
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