The keepers of the Sibylline books had recorded, that the first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated in the year 298, and that from that time forth it always recurred after an interval of 110 years, such being the duration of a secle. This statement is at variance with accounts in the annals, which fixed the celebration of the secular festivals in very different years: these annalists would have no weight at all, if they had really contradicted the authentic books; but on the other hand we have no need to suppose that these books noted down anything more than the close of a secle, and the epoch when the beginning of a new one, according to the precepts of the ceremonial law, should have been celebrated by the people, in gratitude for the continuance of its existence in a new period; without regarding whether the solemnity was deferred from circumstances, as was so often the case with a festival vowed to the gods.

If we go back according to this rule from that first secular epoch of which a historical register was preserved, the end of the first, or rather the beginning of the second secle, falls in the year of the city 78.