This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Roman Religion Hymns gathers three of the atlas's Roman hymns, two archaic and anonymous and one from the height of the Augustan age, together spanning the oldest and among the most securely documented Latin religious poetry to survive.
The Carmen Arvale, the hymn of the Arval Brethren, a priestly college concerned with the fields, is preserved on a stone record of their proceedings and is among the oldest surviving Latin of any kind; by the time it was inscribed the priests almost certainly did not understand what they were singing, since the Latin is archaic to the point of opacity and the text was copied as sound, with nearly every word disputed and no translation commanding agreement. The Carmen Saliare, the archaic processional hymn of the Salii, the twelve leaping priests of Mars, sung during their March and October rites, survives only in fragments quoted by later grammarians who cite it as an example of Latin already largely unintelligible to educated Romans of the late Republic; Quintilian and Varro both remark on its obscurity.
The Carmen Saeculare stands apart from these anonymous, archaic siblings: commissioned by Augustus from the poet Horace for the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE and sung in Sapphic meter by a chorus of twenty seven boys and twenty seven girls addressed as a prayer to Apollo and Diana, it is the first fully preserved Latin hymn whose original occasion of performance is independently documented, its prominence given to Apollo doubling as poetic homage to Augustus, for whom a new Palatine temple to the god had recently been consecrated.