History and Provenance

Custody lay with a priestly college that grew to fifteen members, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, who alone could consult and interpret the verses. The original collection burned when the Capitoline temple was destroyed by fire in 83 BCE, a loss treated as a national emergency. The Senate sent envoys to Erythrae, Samos, Ilium and other centres to gather fresh Sibylline oracles and reconstitute the collection, which Augustus later moved to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. The reconstituted books were consulted into the imperial period and were reportedly burned by the general Stilicho around 405 CE.

The original Capitoline collection, kept in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and consulted by a dedicated priestly college only in times of civic emergency, was destroyed in the fire that burned the temple in 83 BCE. Rome did not simply accept the loss: commissioners were sent out in 76 BCE to gather replacement oracular material from Erythrae, Samos, Sicily and North Africa, assembling a reconstituted collection that Augustus, as pontifex maximus, later had edited and moved to the Temple of Apollo Palatinus around 12 BCE, a relocation that tied the oracles more closely to his own dynastic and religious programme.