This fixed interest in reproducing the essential elements of the temple “the same” actually extended to the contents and decoration of the sanctuary. The Sibylline oracles offer perhaps the most famous example of temple contents that were lost in a fire and subsequently reconstituted. The original oracles were utterly destroyed in the fire of 83 b. c.e. along with Vulca’s terracotta statue of Jupiter (Plut. Mor 379D). The Sibylline Books which, in legend, had been sold to Tarquinius Priscus and in history had been consulted in times of civic crisis, perished despite their being stored underground in a stone box.
After this event, Dionysios of Halikarnassos and Tacitus both inform us that Sibylline oracles were collected from many places - from Italy, Sicily, Ilion, Samos, Africa, Erythrai, and Asia. Dionysios informs us that an embassy was sent to Erythrai to make copies of their oracles. He also informs us that oracles were collected from elsewhere, when private citizens sent them in. Naturally, all of this oracle-gathering occasioned anxiety about the authenticity of the newly gathered texts. The priests - presumably the quindecemviri, since they were in charge of the Sibylline Books - were given the task of identifying which oracles were real, as Tacitus says “to the extent that they were able by human means.” In this phrase, the sense of doubt about the results is palpable. Dionysios tells us that some of the verses were deemed unacceptable because they did not take the form of acrostics - a feature that was commonly taken as a sign of authenticity (D. H. 4.62, Tac. Hist. 6.12).21 Ironically, acrostic oracles do not seem to pre-date the Hellenistic period, so none of the oracles that were judged authentic could have dated back to the sixth century B. C.E., when the original Sybilline Books are legendarily supposed to have been transferred to Tarquinius.22 As E. M. Orlin has asserted, “There is no hint in our sources that the Senatorial commission was trying to find exact duplicates of the oracles which had been lost; rather it was searching for genuine Sibylline utterances. By the first century it was the divine source, the Sibyl, which gave the scrolls their legitimacy, and not the particular hand of the old woman who had visited Tarquinius Superbus. That set could be, and was, supplemented or replaced by any set of oracles which the Senate deemed to be authentically Sibylline.”23 Thus the oracles were replaced but, as a matter of necessity, not reproduced, and a body of religious officials had to be granted to authority to declare particular oracles authentic or inauthentic.
Epigraphic evidence provides another probable instance of reproduction, this time of the sanctuary’s contents after the fire of 83 b. c.e. That fire must have destroyed, or at least badly damaged, many of the prestigious foreign dedications that had been made to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. These included a number of statues of the goddess Roma and of the Genius of the Roman People, which had been dedicated in the Area Capitolina, the open space in front of the Capitoline Temple, by various cities of Asia. In the nineteenth century, T. Mommsen gathered together a number of inscriptions attesting to these dedications, recognized that they belonged together as a group, and dated the inscriptions to the Sullan period.24 A sample inscription reads
In fact, the physical similarities of the stone on which all of these dedications were inscribed (size, material, moldings, and lettering) later led A. DeGrassi to conclude that the inscriptions all belonged to a single monument, a large travertine structure that stood in the Area Capitolina and that may have served as a statue base for all of the dedications.25 Finally, R. Mellor, who agreed with his predecessors about everything except the date of the dedications, argued convincingly that, although the inscriptions are Sullan in date, the contents actually refer to significantly earlier events. Some of the statues mentioned in the inscriptions were originally dedicated in the second century b. c.e., in gratitude for Roman benefactions of that period. This, in turn, means that although some of the first-century b. c.e. dedicatory inscriptions on this monument memorialize contemporary events, others are re-inscriptions, copies of dedicatory inscriptions from the previous century. It is, therefore, not at all unreasonable to suggest that the original dedications were destroyed or seriously damaged in the fire of 83 b. c.e., and that Sulla or Catulus undertook to reproduce the dedicatory inscriptions on a new, replacement monument that was erected near the new Capitoline Temple., 6 This, in turn, raises the intriguing question - which may never be answered - of whether Sulla or Catulus also undertook to reproduce the statues, the actual depictions of Roma and of the Genius of the Roman People, that are referred to in the inscriptions, or whether they were satisfied with reproducing the texts that had once accompanied those statues. Whether or not the statues themselves were replaced, the recreation of the inscriptions is consistent with the other evidence considered here and supports the assertion that the Romans felt a particular need to reproduce the contents of this sanctuary whenever they were damaged or destroyed.
The extreme lengths to which the Romans went to reproduce various contents of the Capitoline temple is further attested to after the fire of 69 C. E, Suetonius tells us that Vespasian undertook to replace the three thousand bronze tablets that recorded decrees of the Senate and information concerning alliances and treaties from throughout the history of the city (Suet. Ves. 8.5). As with the Sibylline Books over a century and a half earlier, the Romans undertook a search for the original texts in other locations [undique investigatis exemplaribus] before they attempted to reconstitute the lost texts. One wonders whether some senatorial decrees and foreign treaties may have been invented anew through the accident of poor memory.
So, the Romans clearly went to some effort to replace the Sibylline oracles, the statues to Roma and the Genius of the Roman People (or at least their inscriptions), and the bronze tablets that recorded treaties, alliances, and senatorial decrees. There is even some evidence, admittedly circumstantial, that the imago, or wax ancestor mask, of Scipio Africanus was replaced, with the blessing and aid of his descendants, after the major fires. Oddly enough, Jupiter’s cella in the Capitoline Temple was also the location of this imago of Scipio, the great general of the Second Punic War, Most prominent families usually kept their ancestor masks in the atrium of the home, so Valerius Maximus interprets the presence of Scipio’s imago in the Capitoline Temple as evidence that, in life, Scipio had considered the sanctuary to be a second home (V. Max. 8.15.1).27 If we consider that the Sibylline Books perished in 83 B. C.E. - although they were in a stone box, under ground and under guard - and that the original cult statue of Jupiter made by Vulca also perished in that fire, what chance is there, then, that a wax mask would have survived this fire, or any of the subsequent fires? After all, the cult statue of Jupiter was in the very same room as Scipio’s mask. Yet Appian, writing in the second century C. E., says that it is still the case (kqI vuv eti) that the image of Scipio is carried from the Capitoline Temple in funeral processions (App. Hisp. 89)! This is not as inexplicable as it might at first seem: H. Flower, in her recent book on ancestor masks, asserts that, “Any relative, either by marriage or by blood, would normally be entitled to keep Africanus’ imago in his or her atrium.”28 There must, therefore, have been a number of copies of Scipio’s ancestor mask to hand, and it would not have been difficult to replace, even to replace repeatedly, the one that was in Jupiter’s cella of the Capitoline Temple.
World History
