In Ancient Rome the Acta Arvalia recorded protocols of the priestly brotherhood (sodalitas) of the Arvales fratres, who emerged from obscurity at the end of the Republican period as an elite group, to judge from the status of their known members in the Augustan period.[1] Though their rituals were conducted outside the pomerium that demarcated the official confines of the city in earliest times, their acta were inscribed in marble tablets fastened to the walls of the Temple of Dea Dia, goddess of the grove, near the Roman Forum. The protocols, the earliest of which are testimony of the early Latin language, were mentioned by M. Terentius Varro, De lingua Latina v.85. "The transcription of the records of this priesthood onto stone provided possibly the biggest coherent complex of inscriptions of the Roman ancient world," Jörg Rüpke has observed.[2] The documentation was restricted to the presence in routine rituals and special occasions (vota) of participating members, the name of the place where sacrifices occurred, and specific dates. The Acta Arvalia are an important source for ancient Roman prosopography[3] and a useful one for the study of Roman religion and cultus. Actual liturgies are lacking: the first instance of a hymn text, the famous Carmen Arvale in incomprehensibly archaic Latin was not entrusted to publication in a stone inscription until the beginning of the third century CE, when few could have deciphered it.
Fragments of the inscriptions were first recovered by Prof Wilhelm Henzen, 1866-69.[4] Further fragments subsequently came to light.