Sortes Virgilianae

The Sortes Vergilianae (Virgilian Lots) is a form of divination by bibliomancy in which advice or predictions of the future are sought by interpreting passages from the works of the Roman poet Virgil. The use of Virgil for divination may date as early as the second century AD, and is part of a wider tradition that associated the poet with magic. The system seems to have been modeled on the ancient Roman sortes as seen in the Sortes Homericae, and later the Sortes Sanctorum.

Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie describes Roman beliefs about poetry and recounts a famous Sors Vergiliana by Decimus Clodius Albinus, a Roman who ruled Britain and laid claim to the Roman Empire, but was defeated in battle by Septimius Severus:

Other recorded Roman instances of the practice are by

In the medieval era Vergil was often thought to have magic powers or a gift of prophecy (e.g. in the works of Dante, where he is the author's guide in the underworld). Clyde Pharr, in the introduction to his edition of the Aeneid, notes that

Rabelais also relates that he drew the more optimistic Aeneid 6, 857, which he took to mean himself.

Viscount Falkland once went to a public library in Oxford with King Charles I and, being shown a finely printed and bound copy of the Aeneid, suggested to the King that he use the Sortes Virgilanae to tell his future. The king opened the book but happened on Dido's prayer against Aeneas in Book 4.615, at which he was troubled. Nevertheless, Falkland took his own lots, hoping to pick a passage that did not relate to him and thus stop the king from worrying about his own. However, he picked the expressions of Evander upon the untimely death of his son Pallas in Book 11, which contemporaries later took to presage Falkland's death at the first Battle of Newbury in 1643 (with Charles's passage predicting his beheading in 1649).

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