The Sibylline Books and Roman Sibylline Oracles
- Date of account
- Roman Republican period onward; surviving collections mainly late antique
- Location
- Rome and the eastern Mediterranean
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The Roman Sibylline Books were a state-controlled collection consulted during crises, while the surviving Sibylline Oracles are a composite body of Jewish and Christian prophetic poetry transmitted in Greek. This lead matters for comparing official divination, pseudepigraphal authorship, apocalyptic expectation, and later Christian appropriation of pagan prophetic authority. The original Roman books were destroyed in antiquity, and the surviving oracles are not identical to them. Dating, authorship, redaction, and the relationship among manuscript traditions remain important scholarly questions.
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