Sortes Vergilianae: when the Aeneid became an oracle
The sortes Vergilianae from the emperors of the Historia Augusta to the medieval Virgil the magician, down to Rabelais and the anecdote of Charles I at Oxford.
No Latin poet enjoyed an authority comparable to Virgil's. Within a few decades of his death in 19 BC, the Aeneid was studied in schools, quoted on the walls of Pompeii and commented on by grammarians. From this veneration arose a singular practice: the sortes Vergilianae, the random opening of the poem to draw a response from it. Virgil thus became, besides the poet of Rome, a kind of written oracle, consulted by emperors, clerics and ordinary readers for centuries.
Homeric lots and the Greek model
The idea of questioning a poem did not begin with Virgil. In the Greek world lots drawn from the verses of Homer were in circulation. Among the Greek magical papyri there survives a Homeric oracle, a list of lines from the Iliad and the Odyssey, each paired with a numerical combination obtained with dice. The epic poem, considered a source of all wisdom, lent itself to being used as a repertoire of answers.
The sortes Vergilianae transferred this model into the Latin world. Unlike systems using dice, however, the best-known form consisted simply of opening the book and reading the line that happened to fall beneath the eye or the finger, interpreting it as the answer to one's question. The practice was simple and required only a copy of the poem, which explains its long popularity among educated readers.
The emperors of the Historia Augusta
The best-known ancient accounts are found in the Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies whose reliability is often debated. It relates that Hadrian, anxious about Trajan's feelings towards him, consulted the sortes Vergilianae and found the lines of the sixth book devoted to Numa, the king from abroad who gave laws to Rome: an omen of his own future rule.
In the life of Alexander Severus, the same collection reports that the young man, still far from the throne, obtained the famous line «tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento», taken from the speech of Anchises. Whatever the truth of these episodes, the stories show that the sortes were regarded as a dignified, almost aristocratic way of questioning fate.
From Virgil the magician to Rabelais
In the Middle Ages Virgil's fame was enriched by legends. In Naples and elsewhere stories circulated about Virgil the magician, maker of talismans and protector of the city. This image strengthened the idea that his verses held a hidden power, and the sortes continued to be practised alongside biblical ones, despite the reservations of churchmen.
In the Renaissance François Rabelais, in the Third Book of Pantagruel, published in 1546, has Pantagruel and Panurge consult the sortes Vergilianae to decide whether Panurge should marry, with comic results. Finally, an anecdote reported by later sources relates that Charles I of England, during the Civil War, drew at Oxford an ominous passage of the Aeneid, later read as a portent of his end.
The sortes Vergilianae prove how far a literary text could become an institution. Questioned for centuries, the poem of Aeneas remained at once a work of art, a schoolbook and a voice of destiny, able to speak to every generation of readers, from ancient Rome to seventeenth-century England and beyond.