Before the Games themselves, heralds went around the city and invited the people to "a spectacle, such as they had never witnessed and never would again". 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. (This may have been modelled on the purificatory rituals of the Parilia, the anniversary of Rome's foundation.) Offerings of wheat, barley, and beans were also made.