The Sibylline Books: the prophecies kept on the Capitol
History of Rome's Sibylline Books: the sale to Tarquin, the quindecemviri who guarded them, new cults introduced, the fire of 83 BC and Stilicho's burning.
For almost a thousand years Rome kept in a secret place a collection of oracles in Greek verse, to be consulted only at moments of grave danger. These were the Sibylline Books, attributed to the Sibyl and entrusted to a college of priests. Unlike Greek oracles, they did not answer private questions: they were an instrument of the state, opened only by order of the Senate when prodigies, plagues or defeats suggested the anger of the gods.
The sale to Tarquin
The best-known account is reported by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aulus Gellius. A foreign woman came to King Tarquin offering him nine books at a very high price. When he refused she burned three and asked the same sum for the remaining six; rejected again, she burned three more. The king, struck by this, then bought the last three at the original price, and the woman vanished.
The sources disagree about the king: some name Tarquinius Priscus, others Tarquinius Superbus. The woman's identity also varies, but the most widespread tradition identified her with the Sibyl of Cumae. It is a legend, but it expresses well the value attributed to those texts: what the king had refused out of meanness became, once partly lost, all the more precious.
The guardians and the consultations
The books were placed in a stone chest beneath the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. At first two men were responsible for them, the duumviri sacris faciundis; in 367 BC the college grew to ten members, half of them plebeians, and in Sulla's time to fifteen, hence the name quindecemviri. Only they could read the verses and report their content to the Senate.
Some of Rome's principal religious innovations arose from these consultations. Livy relates that in 399 BC the first lectisternium was held, a banquet offered to the statues of the gods. At the beginning of the third century BC, during a plague, the cult of Aesculapius was brought from Epidaurus, and in 204 BC, at the height of the war against Hannibal, the sacred stone of the Great Mother was brought to Rome from Asia Minor.
Fires and reconstructions
In 83 BC the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus burned and the books were lost. The Senate then sent envoys to various cities, among them Erythrae in Ionia, to gather new Sibylline verses. Tacitus recalls that an effort was made to separate the authentic texts from the false, a delicate task at a time when many unofficial prophecies were in circulation.
Augustus intervened in his turn. According to Suetonius, he had more than two thousand prophetic books of doubtful authority burned and kept only the Sibylline Books, after having them revised, placing them in two gilded cases beneath the base of the statue of Palatine Apollo. The collection was thus tied to the protecting god of the princeps and to the new political order.
The end came at the beginning of the fifth century AD. The poet Rutilius Namatianus accuses the general Stilicho of having set fire to the books of destiny, an act he regards as a betrayal of Rome. The Greek Sibylline Oracles that have come down to us are a different work, composed in Jewish and Christian circles, and should not be confused with the books of the Capitol.