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7.5 Sibylline Oracles<br />

7.5 Sibylline Oracles<br />

The oracular books bought, aecording to legend, by King Tarquin (1.8) were<br />

an important part of Roman state divination. Kept on the Capitoline hill, in<br />

the charge of the quindeeimviri sacris faciundis, they were consulted on the<br />

Instructions oi the senate after prodigies (2.6c; 6.6b; 7.3) or in other moments<br />

of crisis. The Books seem regularly to have recommended particular rituals to<br />

be carried out in reponse to the prodigy; but in the middle Republic (particularly<br />

in the third century B.C.) a series of consultations ofthe Books led to the<br />

introduction of new deities from the Greek world to <strong>Rome</strong>.<br />

See further: Vol. 1, 27, 62-3; Diels (1890); North (1976) 9*; Parke (1988)<br />

136-51, 190-215.<br />

7.5a A Sibylline Oracle of the Roman Republic<br />

Eighty lines of Greek verse, secming to be a Sibylline Oracle trom the official<br />

collection, are preserved in a book of Wonders, by the second-century A.D.<br />

writer Phlegon, an ex-slave of the emperor Hadrian. There has been some<br />

argument about whether this is a genuine oracle or not, because the Sibylline<br />

Books were usually kept secret. But Phlegon's story is that it was produced by<br />

179

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