The Cumaean Sibyl and the Sibylline Books in ancient Rome
The Sibyl of Cumae, Tarquin and the nine books, the college of the quindecemviri, the burning of the Capitol and the destruction attributed to Stilicho.
Of all the Sibyls of antiquity, the one at Cumae had the closest ties to the history of Rome. In the Greek colony in Campania, among the oldest in the West, tradition placed a prophetess inspired by Apollo, and Rome kept for centuries a collection of oracles attributed to a Sibyl, the Sibylline Books, consulted by the state in times of crisis. Their history is interwoven with legend, politics and Roman public religion.
Tarquin and the nine books
The most famous account is reported by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and by Aulus Gellius. An old foreign woman came before King Tarquin, mostly identified with Tarquin the Proud, offering him nine books of oracles at a very high price. When the king refused, she burned three and asked the same sum for the remaining six; rejected again, she burned three more. Tarquin, impressed, finally bought the last three at the original price, and the woman vanished.
Tradition identified the seller with the Cumaean Sibyl. The books were deposited in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and entrusted to a priestly college, at first of two members, later raised to ten and finally to fifteen, the quindecemviri sacris faciundis. Only the Senate could order them to be consulted, and the priests reported their indications, which usually prescribed new cults or ceremonies of expiation.
Oracles in the service of the state
Through the Sibylline Books Rome welcomed several foreign deities. According to the sources, it was on their advice that the cult of Aesculapius was brought to the city from Epidaurus at the beginning of the third century BC, and in 204 BC, during the war against Hannibal, the sacred stone of the Great Mother was brought from Pessinus in Asia Minor. The books were therefore a means of managing crises and integrating the new into civic religion.
In 83 BC a fire destroyed the Capitoline temple and with it the original collection. The Senate then sent envoys to various cities of the Mediterranean, among them Erythrae, to gather Sibylline verses and rebuild the corpus. Augustus, having become pontifex maximus, had the prophetic texts in circulation examined, destroying many considered spurious, and moved the Sibylline Books to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine.
The cave and the end of the books
Virgil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, has Aeneas visit the Sibyl of Cumae, who guides him in his descent to the underworld. He describes her cave with a hundred openings, from which as many voices issue. In 1932 the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri identified a long trapezoidal gallery cut into the tuff at Cumae as the possible cave of the Sibyl; the interpretation is evocative but still debated by scholars.
The history of the Sibylline Books came to an end at the beginning of the fifth century AD. According to the poet Rutilius Namatianus, it was the general Stilicho who had them burned, an act that the poet, attached to the traditional religion, considered a sacrilege against the very destiny of Rome. With them vanished one of the oldest instruments of Roman public religion.
What survives today are the Sibylline Oracles in Greek, largely composed in Jewish and Christian circles, which do not coincide with Rome's official books. The Cumaean Sibyl lived on instead in literature and art, from Ovid, who tells of her wish for an extremely long life granted without youth, to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo portrayed her old and powerful.