I hate it
01 Dec 2025 - VelikTzar
Words: Doesn't matter. Time: You're not real
It has been a while.
You could say this is a new beginning. But you know that’d be wrong.
You’ll never escape us and be different, etc etc.
Oh, how everyone loves telling you to move on. Remember, they say, remember how you used to dream of a bright future?
Not that you need much reminding. You remember, for you are surrounded by the ghosts of the past, every day a mockery of what has come before.
You’ve always grown far too easily attached to things, something they never understood. Every object, every action, they carry with them a thousand memories, and they’ve seen your thoughts, in a time long gone, and they remind you of them, not just of what you did, and what was, but of what you thought, and what could have been.
You can’t help it, really, you’ve always been like that. Attached to the past, incapable of conceiving anything new. But they’d be unfair to blame you. What are you meant to do when your world is broken irreparably? What are you meant to do when you’ll never be at peace again?
Lost, forever lost to those from the East is Valimar.
In the year of the consulship of Philippicus and Severus, else known as 1000 AUC, the Secular Games were held. They were to herald the beginning of a new millenium, a new golden age. Spectacular games, games which noone alive had seen, or will see. Games that continued a tradition that stretched back to the founding of the Republic. Games to reaffirm Rome’s pact with the gods, and win back the favor of her pantheon.
You were on the same train a year ago, but going in the opposite direction. Well, you were on that journey back and forth many times, but home was in the other direction. Not that there is one anymore. Not that there can be. Ibi Papa Roma est, but where you are there is hell. Just one of the many ways in which doing those same things feels like a perverse mockery of what was. Regardless, the sky was beautiful. Very beautiful. A cold, deep blue, slowly growing paler and at the edge of it white, as the sun was setting over the horizon. Of the trees, the houses on the field, you could only see their silhouettes, flat and pure black against the blue background. Of course, you remembered taking a picture of that exact same scene in that gone and different time, and indeed there was the photo in your camera roll. You could appreciate the beauty of simple things like that. No more.
To us moderns, secular means “of or relating to the physical world and not the spiritual world”. But that word comes from the latin saeculum, an age, an amount of time so that everyone who has been alive at the start of it would not be alive at the end of it, which the Romans understood to be a period of ~100 years (where century comes from in Romance languages). The idea of the Secular Games practically screams renewal. Philip himself minted coins proclaiming this “saeculum novum”, a new era, and many emperors after did as well. And there was desperately the need for renewal, for Rome was in the middle of the 3rd century crisis. Civil wars ravaged the empire and the barbarians were at the gates. Philip the Arab himself had risen to the throne after the mysterious death of the previous emperor, Gordian III, in a war against the Parthians (Philip had just been appointed Praetorian Prefect after the mysterious death of the previous prefect, and after ascending to the throne, paid a large indemnity and ceded land to the Parthians. Parthicus Maximus indeed). To the superstitious Romans, looking back on the glory days of the Pax Romana, it must have seen as though the gods had abandoned them. You can understand the feeling of walking towards disaster. Of the gradual slide towards collapse, even as it seems impossible, until it suddenly is. But, as you have learnt far too many times, it can always get worse.
It is getting dark very early here, at the edge of the world. You used to think it miserable, but now you’ve come to appreciate it. Spring and summer, with their long days, where it had scarcely gotten dark before the dawn chorus announces the dawn, with their life and bloom, where the many plants and animals flourish, and so are we humans meant to as well, with their expectation of happiness and joviality, of the gaiety of youth, of the voluptousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters, of collective merriment, of hope, of love and life, can be nothing to someone that has nothing and has set their heart to despair, but an insult. As if the very earth, indeed all of Creation, has united against you. How dreadful the discord between your soul and the world around you would feel! Indeed, you’ve already felt it, but it’d be even worse this time. No, let it be dark forever, let it forever be gloomy November, unchanging, every day ever shorter, and bleeding into the one after. But you still despair, when looking out in the darkness, not because of it, but because every day brings the solstice ever closer. The idea of the light coming back, that is what scares you. Time’s arrow always marches on.
But you have no doubt they, and Philip, must have felt hopeful and elated as the anniversary approached. Though no doubt he wanted to use the games to shore up his legitmacy, he would have also wanted to be the one to save the empire from its apparent to all decline all the same. He was the main character after all. The Roman Empire, an empire without limit*, could not be without a head, and that head was the emperor. If anyone could save the world, it’d be him. The Romans were very conservative, and their remedy was to do what has been done before, what has worked before, here on this special date. By emulating the past they’d win back the favor of their patron deities. It had to be that way. But alas, you can’t claw back the past. You can’t ever recreate those sublime moments. You can’t, the feeble creature that you are, but neither could the master of the world.
You think it’s annoying? You’re not alone. But you are annoying. You are here, after all, instead of doing literally anything else, and then what, you’d go back to scrolling through SFVC (short-form video content), wilting away, becoming the worst version of yourself.
A year ago you wanted to be the best. Now isn’t that a perverse mockery of the past.
1 year is a nice number. Nice and round. A shame it doesn’t mean anything
1000 years, that’s not an ordinary number. It feels like it should matter. That it should signal achievement, and new beginnings. There are those that may find this obsession with symbolism ludicrous. They say, every day marks an amount of time since something happened, why should it be special. A different way of seeing the world, perhaps. More rational. But you can’t blame the Romans and Philip, you would have felt the same way. In your sad, pathetic life, dates carry a special meaning too. Every new month that comes carries with it the ghosts of the past. As they tell you, you should just get out of your head. Perhaps they are right, but imagine telling that to the Romans, as their world had come apart (well, at that point, coming apart).
Regardless, Philip held his games. You are sure everyone had a grand time, a ball, even (except for the gladiators that died in the games, a thousand. Great number.). The gods were honored. The gods. Which gods? Augustus, when he held his games, honored his beloved Apollo on the last day, with a great sacrifice. Now Apollo’s a great god, very sunny and all, but he was not who the games were about originally.
Though it was said that they dated back to the founding of Rome, that wasn’t exactly the case. Augustus, ever the propagandist, merged several pre-existing religious traditions and added a sprinkle of destiny with the whole renewal and new age thing. The Republic has been restored, and blessed with Augustan peace.
The story goes that a Sabine man named Valesius had three sick children. He prayed, and got told to have them drink water from the temple of Dis Pater and Porsepina in Tarentum. And so he set off down the Tiber, to go out to sea and sail south (Tarentum, or Taras, being a Greek colony in the south of Italy, modern day Taranto). When he was passing by the Campus Martius, the field of Mars, where later the citizens of the Republic would assemble to go to war (or to vote, for once it used to be the same), he learnt that there was a place called the Tarentum there, and he stopped. He boiled water for his children at a place where smoke was coming off of the ground (fair enough, very underworldly), and then, when they woke up, they were healthy, and told him to sacrifice black animals at night (racism). He wanted to then sacrifice to Dis Pater and Porsepina, and so ordered the construction of a temple on the spot. But his workmen, whilst digging, found an old temple to Dis Pater buried there. Valesius did his sacrifice, and buried the temple again.
That these games were never called ludi saeculares during the republic, but ludi Tarentini is of no concern. Nor is that most pre-Augustan sources state the first instance of the games was in 249 BC lightning or 146 BC need not concern you, neither should the fact that the only source for earlier ones pre-Augustus is Valerius Antias, a member of the gens Valeria, and that the first two Saecular games during the republic, according to him in 509 and 348 BC, were held during the consulships of other Valerii (Publicola and Corvinus). Nor should you look at the fact that even though the great late Republican scholar Varro would be aware of calling a period of 100 years a saeculum, he explicitly doesn’t do so in the context of the Ludi Tarentini (“ the games should happen every hundredth year” - ludi centesimo quoque anno fierent).
No, a word came from the Palatine, and the matter was resolved.
Dis Pater was a Roman deity of the underworld. With time, the Romans equated him with Pluto, and with the Greek Hades. And Porsepina became equated with Persephone, his wife who he kidnapped.
It wasn’t these gods Augustus honored, nor did Philip. But Pluto’s called wealthy precisely because he attracts all to him.
So much for a return to tradition.
The next year the Danube legions proclaimed their commander Pacatianus Imperator. Imagine becoming the head of the world (or at least, you know, get proclaimed as such). Philip considered resignation (as if), but the Senate rallied behind him, and his foremost supporter was one senator Decius. Soon after, however, Pacantius, this new head of the world, was murdered by those who had elevated him, afraid as they had become of losing, and the subsequent punishment. Philip then sent Decius to discipline the legions. Instead, leading the army he was supposed to reign in, Decius marched on Italy, and defeated Philip in battle.
Not that Decius would last long either.
The Romans, they were right about one thing. No one alive would see such games again . A hundred years later, the Romans had chosen a new god from the east to protect them, and these pagan games had no place in the new order. A hundred years after that, Rome had already been sacked, for the first time in centuries, and soon would be so again, and her empire lay in ruins .
In the end, the sad and infernal gods claimed Philip, as they did his empire. As they will claim all. So much for romae aeternae, and so much for new beginnings.
So long, my enemies !
The end was just a dream, and what do dreams matter in the end?\
Cease, my flute, now cease the song of Maenalus!