Roman Eschatology (Sibylline Oracles)

Rome produced no native eschatology of its own but became the great recycler of other peoples' ends. The Sibylline books, a collection of oracular sayings kept by a priestly college and consulted in crises, were Greek in origin and were already being forged and expanded by the time Rome guarded them. What Rome added was a political eschatology of return.

The Cumaean Sibyl in Virgil's Aeneid (c. 19 BCE) guides Aeneas through the underworld and shows him the soul of a future Roman, the shape of empire to come. That is not an end of the world but it establishes the Sibyl as a Roman voice of last things. Centuries later, Christian editors rewrote the oracles entirely: the Sibylline Oracles of books 1 to 8 (written roughly between the second century BCE and the third century CE, with heavy Christian interpolation) make the Sibyl foretell the coming of Christ, the resurrection, and the final judgment. A pagan prophetess was drafted as a Gentile witness to the Christian end.

The other Roman contribution is the belief in the returning emperor. After Nero's suicide in 68 CE, a persistent tradition held that he was not dead but would return from the east at the head of an army, a "Nero redivivus" who became, in Christian hands, a prototype of the Antichrist. Suetonius records the rumour; Revelation's beast from the abyss, slain and yet living, reads naturally against it. The expectation that a vanished ruler would come back to close the age is a Roman imperial anxiety that the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writers turned into doctrine.

Where the Stoics gave Rome a cosmic fire (the ekpyrosis, the world periodically consumed and reborn), the imperial cult gave it a political one: the empire that ended would also return. Both ideas passed into the medieval West, the first as natural philosophy, the second as the Last Emperor legend that Germany and Byzantium would each claim.