The Sibyl

The teaching

Taught from Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid, the Roman tale of the books, Heraclitus and the Sibylline Oracles.

The voice of a thousand years

The first word of her comes from Heraclitus, as Plutarch quotes him: the Sibyl with raving mouth utters things without laughter, without ornament and without perfume, and her voice reaches across a thousand years, through the god. She is not a priestess who answers when asked, as the Pythia does at Delphi, but a woman seized by the god who prophesies unbidden, often of disasters far off. Plato counts her among those whose divine madness has done Greece good: the prophetesses of Delphi and Dodona, he says, have done great things for Greece when out of their senses and little or nothing when in them, and the Sibyl and others with inspired foresight have set many on the right road. In time her name became the name of a kind, and Varro, the Roman antiquary, counted ten: the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Cimmerian, the Erythraean, the Samian, the Cumaean, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian and the Tiburtine.

Herophile

Pausanias was shown the rock at Delphi where a Sibyl named Herophile stood to sing. In her verses she says that she was born of a mortal father and a nymph of Mount Ida, and calls herself the wife of Apollo, and his sister, and his daughter; and long before the war she sang that Helen would be the ruin of Asia and of Europe. She wandered from Samos to Claros, Delos and Delphi, and died in the Troad, where her tomb stood in the grove of Apollo Smintheus.

The books on the Capitol

After the bargain with King Tarquin, Rome laid the three books that remained in a stone chest beneath the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, in the keeping of two men, later ten, later fifteen, who alone might open them, and only at the senate's command, when a plague, a defeat or a portent showed the gods were angry. The books answered not with forecasts but with remedies: a new rite, a feast for the gods, a new god brought in. So in the war with Hannibal they told Rome that a foreign enemy could be driven from Italy if the Mother of the Gods were brought from Pessinus in Phrygia, and her sacred stone was carried to the city. When the books burned, the senate sent to Erythrae, Samos, Troy and the Greek cities of Italy for verses to make a new collection, and Augustus laid it in gilded cases beneath the statue of Apollo on the Palatine.

The cave at Cumae

Virgil gives her a name, Deiphobe, daughter of Glaucus, priestess of Apollo and of Hecate, and a cavern cut into the rock at Cumae with a hundred mouths, from which her answers rush out in a hundred voices. The seer Helenus has warned Aeneas that she writes her prophecies on leaves and sets them in order in her cave, but when the door opens the wind scatters them and she never gathers them again, so that many go away unanswered; so Aeneas begs her to sing, not to write. As the god comes on her, her face and colour change, her hair falls loose, her breast heaves, she grows taller and her voice is no longer mortal: the god, she cries, behold the god. She rages in the cave, trying to throw him off, as Apollo works her mouth like a rider breaking a horse, until the doors fly open.

Wars, she foretells, horrid wars, the Tiber foaming with blood, a second Achilles and a foreign bride once more; and she gives him the counsel that is hers alone: do not yield to troubles, but go against them more boldly than your fortune allows.

The descent

When Aeneas asks to go down to his dead father she tells him the truth of that road: the way down is easy, for the door of black Dis stands open night and day, but to retrace one's steps and come out to the upper air, that is the task, that the labour. First he must find in a dark wood the golden bough, sacred to the queen of the dead, which comes away easily in the hand of one whom fate calls and which no force can break otherwise, and when it is plucked another grows in its place; and he must bury his drowned comrade Misenus. After the sacrifices to Hecate she cries to the uninitiated to keep far off, tells Aeneas that now he needs courage and a steady heart, and plunges into the cave with him at her heels.

Below, she is his guide and his teacher. She stills Cerberus with a drugged cake of honey, tells him the crimes punished behind the walls of Tartarus, which Hecate once showed her, and has him set the bough on the threshold of Persephone's house before they pass into the fields of the blessed to find his father.

Grains of dust

Ovid lets her tell her own story as she leads Aeneas back up the dark road. She is no goddess, she says. When she was young, Apollo, wanting her, offered her whatever she wished, and she pointed to a heap of dust and asked for as many birthdays as it had grains, and forgot to ask that the years be young ones. He would have given her youth too had she yielded to him, but she refused. Now she has lived seven hundred years and must see three hundred harvests more to match the dust; she shall shrink until her body weighs almost nothing, no one shall believe a god once loved her, and Apollo himself shall not know her, but the Fates shall leave her her voice. In Petronius' novel the freedman Trimalchio boasts that he saw her at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, Sibyl, what do you want, she answered, I want to die.

The Church's witness

The books that survive under her name, the Sibylline Oracles, were written by Jewish and then Christian authors who borrowed her voice for their own prophecies: the fall of empires one after another, a judgement by fire, the kingdom of God on earth. One poem among them hides an acrostic whose first letters, as Augustine records, spell in Greek Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. Christians took the pagan seer for a witness from outside to what the prophets of Israel had foretold, and read Virgil's fourth Eclogue the same way, with its last age of the Cumaean song and the child at whose birth a golden race shall rise through all the world. So she passed into the Church's own song: the Dies Irae sings of the day of wrath that shall dissolve the world in ashes, as David bears witness with the Sibyl.

What the tellers read in her

The Greeks heard in her the god's voice breaking through a human one, and honoured her raving as a madness sent from heaven, wiser than sober sense. Rome kept her as a counsellor in danger, whose books gave not the future but the rite that would set things right. Virgil made her the guide who knows that the way down is easy and the way back the labour, and Ovid the warning of long life asked for without youth. The Church made her a witness that truth had been spoken outside Israel too, and T. S. Eliot set Petronius' words at the head of The Waste Land: the seer who has outlived everything and longs only to die.