THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
The Romans had this legend where an old woman came to court of the last king of Rome.
She offered to sell him nine books at an outrageous price.
The King refused.
The next day the woman returned with six books, offering them to the king for the same price.
He again refused.
On the third day she returned with only three books, still asking the same price.
The king, now full of self doubt and trepidation, gave in, and payed full price for these three
mysterious books.
It turned out that the old woman was actually a Sibyl; a woman cursed with unnaturally long
life, with the ability to see the future.
The books, according to the legend, were full of prophecies, foretelling the future of the
Roman people.
The books were immediately sealed away in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and
guarded by a specialized order of priests.
Some of the prophecies turned out to be quite mundane.
For instance, one said that after a bad harvest, Rome simply had to set up orders of priests
related to agriculture and fertility, and this would make the next year's harvest bountiful.
This was a pretty common type of religious observance for an ancient Mediterranean city-state.
It's not really surprising.
On the other hand, there's stuff like this: after the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, the
Romans consulted the Sibylline books, which said that in order to defeat their enemy,
they had to take two Gauls and two Greeks and bury them alive right in the center of
Rome.
Let's be absolutely clear about this: the Romans hated human sacrifice.
hey heard stories about far away barbarians who practiced it, and it shocked them to their
core.
Parents would tell their children that if they didn't behave, the Celts would come in
the night and steal them away, presumably to sacrifice them to their strange foreign
gods.
It's a huge deal that the Sibylline Books actually prescribed human sacrifice, and it's
an even bigger deal that the Romans actually went through with it.
Another significant prophecy came to light during Caesar's dictatorship.
He was getting ready to go off and wage a war against the Parthians.
Word started to get around that there was a Sibylline prophecy that said that only a
King could defeat the Parthians.
This was taken by the public as definitive proof that Caesar had ambitions to crown himself
king.
This incident was the reason that Caesar had his man Marc Antony publicly offer him a crown
during a festival, only to make a big show of refusing it.
It was one big PR stunt.
But the rumour persisted, and played a big role in Caesar's eventual assassination.
But my favourite Sibylline prophecy came up during the Second Punic War.
A strange meteor shower was immediately followed by a failed harvest and a string of military
defeats.
The Sibylline Books were consulted, and as a remedy they said that a specific Greek god
had to be adopted into the Roman pantheon.
The Greeks called this god Cybele, although the Greeks themselves imported it from Anatolia.
Simple cultural appropriation wasn't enough, though.
A quest was conceived to take Cybele's sacred stone from its home in Anatolia, bring it
to Rome.
It was to be placed in the Temple to the goddess Victoria, the Goddess of Victory.
It sounds like something out of a fantasy novel.
A two man team was sent, and after a long, dangerous journey they entered into negotiations
with a local king in Anatolia.
If they were like most Roman negotiators, they probably payed absolutely no respect
to the crown, told him that their stone and their god belonged to Rome now.
They might have even threatened him with war.
Honestly the Romans were either the best or the worst negotiators in human history.
They just... had their own way.
But it worked.
They returned to Rome with the stone, and placed it in the Temple to Victoria amid huge
public festivals honouring their new goddess.
The Romans called her Magna Mater, the Great Mother.
So looking back, do we think that the Romans actually believed in the Sibylline prophecies?
Whenever events threatened the survival of Rome itself, the books were always consulted,
and usually the prescription was to tweak the Roman Constitution, or to adopt a new
god, or celebrate a new festival.
In other words, something relatively small.
Something symbolic.
Something that would calm the public.
But then again, people must have had some faith in the them, because when the books
told them to abandon their cultural taboos and bury four people alive in the center of
Rome, the entire city just went along with it.