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Michelangelo's rendering of the Erythraean Sibyl Tarquin the Proud receives the Sibylline books (1912 illustration). According to the Roman tradition, the oldest collection of Sibylline books appears to have been made about the time of Solon and Cyrus at Gergis on Mount Ida in the Troad; it was attributed to the Hellespontine Sibyl and was preserved in the temple of Apollo at Gergis.
Many are anecdotal, and have survived as proverbs. Several are ambiguously phrased, apparently in order to show the oracle in a good light regardless of the outcome. Such prophecies were admired for their dexterity of phrasing. The following list presents some of the most prominent and historically significant prophecies of Delphi.
The Sibylline Oracles in their existing form are a chaotic medley. They consist of 12 books (or 14) of various authorship, date, and religious conception. The final arrangement, thought to be due to an unknown editor of the 6th century AD (Alexandre), does not determine identity of authorship, time, or religious belief; many of the books are merely arbitrary groupings of unrelated fragments.
Potter, David Stone, , Prophecy and history in the crisis of the Roman Empire: a historical commentary on the Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle, 1990. Cf. Chapter 3. review of book Archived 1999-04-27 at the Wayback Machine; Potter, David Stone, Prophets and Emperors.
In Roman histories and biographies, particularly Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, the lives, personal character and destinies of various emperors can be read in reported portents, omens and dreams; the emperor Caligula, for example, dreamt that he stood before the throne of Jupiter, king of the gods, and Jupiter kicked him down from heaven to ...
An augur was a priest and official in the classical Roman world. His main role was the practice of augury, the interpretation of the will of the gods by studying events he observed within a predetermined sacred space (templum). The templum corresponded to the heavenly space above.
An augur with sacred chicken; he holds a lituus, the curved wand often used as a symbol of augury on Roman coins. Augury was a Greco-Roman religion practice of observing the behavior of birds, to receive omens. When the individual, known as the augur, read these signs, it was referred to as "taking the auspices".
Roman historians [14] regarded the essentials of Republican religion as complete by the end of Numa's reign, and confirmed as right and lawful by the Senate and people of Rome: the sacred topography of the city, its monuments and temples, the histories of Rome's leading families, and oral and ritual traditions. [15]