The Sibyl's Books: What Rome Paid For

She comes from Cumae.

The old woman arrives at the court of Tarquinius Superbus — the last king of Rome — carrying nine books. She offers them for sale at a price that Dionysius says was enormous, though he does not specify the amount. She says they are divine prophecies, the accumulated wisdom of the god Apollo given through his prophetess at Cumae, covering the whole future of Rome.

The king looks at the price. He looks at the old woman.

He refuses.

Without comment, she takes three of the nine books outside. She burns them. She comes back with six books and the same price she asked for nine.

He refuses again.

She burns three more.

She comes back with three books and the same price she asked for nine.

At this point, Tarquinius consults his augurs. They look at the remaining books. They say: these are divine. Buy them. He buys the three books at the original price of all nine.

The old woman vanishes. She is never seen again in Rome. No one finds out where she came from, whether she was the Sibyl herself or her representative, whether the six burned books are truly gone or were never more than performance. Rome has three books and has paid for nine.

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The books are stored on the Capitoline.

They are placed in a stone chest in the crypt of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the greatest temple in Rome, the house of the god to whom the Sibyl’s prophecies were sacred. A board of priests — first two, then ten, then fifteen men, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis — are responsible for their custody and their interpretation.

The books are not read casually. They are not consulted for the routine questions of Roman religion — those are handled by the augurs and haruspices in the normal way. The Sibylline Books are consulted only in emergencies: when prodigies occur that cannot be explained by ordinary divinatory procedures, when plague strikes and ordinary medicine fails, when military catastrophe threatens the survival of the city.

The procedure requires a Senate decree. Then the quindecimviri descend to the crypt, retrieve the appropriate section, interpret it in light of the crisis at hand, and report to the Senate. Their reports do not say: we found this specific prophecy about this specific event. They say: the books recommend this ritual, this foreign god’s introduction, this purification, this response.

The books are not a newspaper with tomorrow’s headlines. They are a ritual instruction manual for unprecedented situations.

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They prescribe the introduction of foreign gods.

The single most significant function of the Sibylline Books in Roman religious history is the authorization of new cults. When Rome faced the Second Punic War and Hannibal was winning, the Books were consulted and recommended the introduction of the Magna Mater — the Great Mother, Cybele — from Phrygia. Rome sent an embassy to the king of Pergamum, acquired the sacred black stone that represented the goddess, brought her to Rome in a ceremony of extraordinary solemnity, and built her a temple on the Palatine Hill.

The Books authorized the same kind of importation repeatedly: Asclepius from Epidaurus after a plague, Bacchus’s Dionysiac rites (later suppressed), various other eastern cults. The Sibyl, speaking through her books, told Rome which gods it needed and when. The cosmopolitan character of Roman religion — its capacity to absorb and adopt deities from everywhere in the Mediterranean world — is in significant part a function of what the Books authorized.

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The books were destroyed in 83 BCE.

The fire that burned the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in the Social War’s aftermath destroyed the stone chest and its contents. Rome was left without its divine instruction manual during the decades of civil war that followed. The Senate sent representatives throughout the Mediterranean to collect surviving Sibylline oracles, compile them, evaluate their authenticity, and reconstitute the collection.

The reconstituted books were lodged in the rebuilt Temple of Jupiter. Augustus had them transferred in 12 BCE — when he became Pontifex Maximus — to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, his personal divine patron’s house. The move is significant: the Sibyl’s books went from Jupiter’s crypt to Apollo’s temple. The prophetic oracle of Rome was reassigned from the old guardian to the new one.

Whether Augustus believed the reconstituted books were the original Sibyl’s words, or pragmatic compilations that would function as well as the originals for the purposes they served, is unknown. He used them. He reorganized them. He kept them in the god’s house.

Three books were enough, in the end. They always are.