The Games were revived in 17 BC by Rome's first emperor Augustus, with the nocturnal sacrifices on the Campus Martius now transferred to the Moerae (fates), the Ilythiae (goddesses of childbirth), and Terra Mater ("Mother Earth").
According to Roman mythology told by Zosimus, the Secular Games originated with a Sabine man called Valesius, ancestor of the Valerii.
[16] According to Varro, an antiquarian of the 1st century BC, the Games were introduced after a series of portents led to a consultation of the Sibylline Books by the quindecimviri.
[17] In accordance with the instructions contained in these books, sacrifices were offered at the Tarentum on the Campus Martius over three nights, to the underworld deities of Dis Pater and Proserpina.
Varro also states that a vow was made that the Games would be repeated every hundred years, and another celebration did indeed take place in either 149 or 146 BC, at the time of the Third Punic War.
[15][18] However, Beard, North and Price suggest that the Games of 249 and the 140s BC were both held because of the immediate pressures of war, and that it was only with the revival in the 140s that they came to be considered as a regular centennial celebration.
[12] The quindecimviri sat on the Capitol and in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, and handed out to the free citizens torches, sulphur and asphalt, to be burnt as a means of purification.
[24] The night-time sacrifices were made not to the underworld deities Dis Pater and Proserpina, but to the Moerae (fates), the Ilythiae (goddesses of childbirth), and Terra Mater (the "Earth mother").
These were "more beneficent honorands, who nonetheless shared with Dis Pater and Proserpina the twin characteristics of being Greek in nomenclature and without cult in the Roman state".
After the sacrifices of June 3, choirs of boys and girls sang the Carmen Saeculare, composed for the occasion by the poet Horace.
c. 498–518), who wrote the most detailed extant account of the Games, blamed this neglect of the traditional ritual for the decline of the Roman Empire.