Late in the Second Punic War, with Hannibal still in Italy and a season of stone-showers read as ill portents, the Sibylline Books were consulted and returned a promise: a foreign enemy could be driven from Italy if the Idaean Mother of Pessinus, the goddess later known at Rome as the Magna Mater, were brought to the city. Livy records that Delphi was separately consulted and confirmed the promise. An embassy secured the goddess's sacred black stone from Pessinus in Phrygia by way of Attalus I of Pergamum, and it reached Rome in April 204 BCE.
Facts
Sources
Primary SourceLivy, Ab Urbe Condita 29.10-11 and 29.14. 1 Disputed
Documented ResponseModern scholarship complicates a clean reading of the episode as prophecy straightforwardly fulfilled by faith. Erich Gruen's study reads the importation as at least as much a diplomatic courtship of Attalus I and the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum as a religious response to the war. Separately, a 2004 monograph on the episode, reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, argues that the attached legend of Scipio Nasica's selection to receive the goddess and of Claudia Quinta proving her chastity by freeing the stranded ship is a later literary elaboration from the Gracchan period rather than a contemporary record, a doubt Livy himself already voiced in the surviving text. 2 Fulfillment
Claimed FulfillmentThat bringing the Magna Mater's sacred stone from Pessinus to Rome would allow Rome to drive Hannibal, the foreign enemy then occupying Italian soil, out of Italy and to victory. 1 Documented ResponseThe black stone reached Rome in April 204 BCE and was installed on the Palatine, with the Megalensia games founded in the goddess's honour; her temple there was dedicated in 191 BCE. Hannibal was recalled from Italy to Africa in 203 BCE, was defeated at Zama in 202 BCE, and the war ended in Roman victory in 201 BCE, a sequence the Roman tradition's own record reads as the oracle's promise fulfilled. 1 Origins
Attributed Author / CompilerThe Sibylline Books, Rome's collection of oracular verses consulted by the state at moments of crisis, confirmed by a separate consultation of the oracle at Delphi. 1 Dating
Predicted DateNo fixed calendar date for the promised deliverance itself; the oracle was conditional, that the foreign enemy could be driven out once the Idaean Mother was brought to Rome. The consultation is placed around 205 BCE and the stone arrived in April 204 BCE. 1 Date AttributedAround 205 BCE, during the darkest stretch of the war with Hannibal still on Italian soil. 1 Attributions
TraditionRoman state religion's Sibylline oracular tradition, in which the Senate consulted the Books at moments of civic crisis and acted on their prescriptions as a matter of public religious duty. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The goddess whose arrival the oracle promised would drive Hannibal from Italy; this record makes the promise a comparable, cited fact in its own right rather than leaving it as prose on her own page.
The war the oracle's promise concerned, and in which Hannibal was the named foreign enemy.
Attributed To
Belongs to Tradition
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