The Two Thousand Books Augustus Burned

Augustus waited twenty-three years for the job. The office of pontifex maximus, head of Roman state religion, was held for life, and it was held by Lepidus, a man Augustus had stripped of everything else and left alive in comfortable exile precisely because killing him would have looked like impatience.

Lepidus finally died in 13 BCE. In March of the following year Augustus took the office, and one of the first things he did with it was organise a bonfire.

A collection, then a fire

Suetonius describes it in a single sentence, in the flat administrative tone he uses for policy. Augustus gathered up every prophetic writing in circulation in Greek or Latin that was either anonymous or attributed to an author of no standing, and burned more than two thousand of them.

Two thousand books. Not a library in one building. A sweep of the city.

It's worth being clear that Suetonius is the only source for that number, and he was writing roughly a hundred and thirty years after the fact. The event is not in doubt; the arithmetic is one man's. But even a heavily rounded figure tells you the scale of what was out there, which is the more interesting fact. Rome in the first century BCE was awash with prophecy, most of it unsigned, and enough of it to fill a fire.

Why a government cares what a book predicts

The reflex is to file this under superstition. It isn't. It's security policy.

An anonymous oracle is a weapon with no fingerprints. It can announce that Rome has a fixed lifespan and the clock is nearly out. It can predict a king, which in Rome was the single most dangerous word available. It can name a coming saviour, or a coming disaster, or a coming punishment for a specific man. And because it claims divine authorship, it can't be argued with in the way a pamphlet can.

The generation before Augustus had watched this work. Civil war Rome ran on portents. Every side had its omens, and a well-timed prophecy could move a legion.

So the fire wasn't aimed at prophecy. It was aimed at unlicensed prophecy. Augustus was not abolishing the idea that the gods send messages about the future of the state. He was making himself the only person entitled to receive them.

The part that should worry you more

The books he kept are the more revealing half of the story.

Rome had an official collection: the Sibylline Books, consulted by a priestly college on the Senate's instruction, and never read out in public. Augustus did not destroy them. But Suetonius says he made a choice even among those.

Read that again. The state's own sacred, authenticated, centuries-old collection was edited by the man who had just taken charge of it, and nobody recorded which parts went.

Then he moved them. They had lived on the Capitol, in the temple of Jupiter, the traditional centre of Roman public religion. Augustus relocated them to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, into two gilded cases under the pedestal of the god's statue.

The Palatine Apollo was his own foundation, vowed and built by him, and it stood immediately beside his house.

Rome's oracular archive had moved from the civic hill to the emperor's front garden, and the fact that it was done reverently, in a beautiful new temple, with gold fittings, is the whole technique. This is not a man suppressing religion. It's a man taking custody of it.

The books were already a reconstruction

There's a complication that makes the edit harder to see and easier to get away with.

In 83 BCE the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol burned down, and the original Sibylline collection burned with it. Rome sent commissioners around the Greek world, to Erythrae, Samos, Africa and Sicily, to buy replacement oracles and reassemble a collection.

So the books Augustus inherited were themselves a compilation, roughly seventy years old, assembled by committee from a market that had every incentive to supply what Rome was paying for. Verifying them was not really possible. Which means the vetting had to be done by judgement, and judgement is a door.

Tacitus shows us that door still open forty years later. Under Tiberius, in 32 CE, a book was proposed for admission to the official collection as genuine Sibylline material. There was a debate in the Senate. It was rejected, and the priests were told to review what they held.

Rome knew perfectly well that its holiest archive was porous. It handled the problem the way institutions do: with a committee.

The unusual thing about this censorship

Most attempts to suppress a text in antiquity failed, much as most attempts to erase a person did. Books were copied privately, smuggled, memorised, and generally outlived whoever wanted them gone. Roman authorities burned the works of Cremutius Cordus and Labienus, and both survived in circulation for a while afterwards.

This one worked.

We have no Roman Sibylline Books. Not a page. What survives under the name Sibylline Oracles is a different thing entirely: a sprawling Jewish and Christian corpus in Greek verse, written over centuries by people borrowing the Sibyl's authority for their own arguments. It's genuinely interesting. It is not what the priests unlocked when the Senate asked what to do about a plague.

Of the two thousand burned books, we have nothing at all: no titles, no authors, no fragments, no summaries. We know they existed because one biographer counted them.

Then the official collection went too. Around 405 CE, with the empire's western half coming apart, the general Stilicho is said to have had it destroyed. The accusation comes from Rutilius Namatianus, a poet who despised Stilicho and was looking for crimes to hang on him, so it may be propaganda rather than record. It may equally be true. Either way, nothing turns up afterwards.

What's left is a location. Two gilded boxes, under the feet of a statue, in a temple beside a house on the Palatine, and no idea what was inside them, because the man who put them there had already been through it.