Sibyl

SIBYL. - The S. (etymology unknown) is in classical tradition a virgin, young, but sometimes also thought of as decrepit, who when inspired and almost possessed by Apollo reveals the future: «Sibylla dicitur omnis puella cuius pectus numen recipit» (Serv., Ad Aen., III, 445); an essentially popular concept, inasmuch as all peoples recognize in woman a greater receptivity and a consequent greater capacity to be subject to the possession of a numen and to express its will.

I. THE SIBYLS IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

In Greece this figure (of which no trace is found in the Olympian religion) came to be developed under the influence of the cult of Dionysus, characterized precisely by demonic possession, by that same possession, that is, from which the Pythia at Delphi was born. The Sibyl and the Pythia differ from each other in this, that, while the Pythia has a manifestation more determined and more controlled in manner and in effects, the Sibyl enjoys a greater freedom of personal inspiration, not necessarily bound either to a sanctuary or to a priesthood.

The Sibyl in general prophesies disasters: this pessimistic character of hers is well summed up by the fragment of Heraclitus (92, ed. Diels): "The Sibyl with raving mouth (that is, possessed by the god) utters gloomy things (pessimism) without ornament or perfumes and through the god's power reaches with her voice across thousands of years (decrepitude)."

Although unique in conception, the Sibyl had various local specifications almost always associated with a sacred spring or a cave; Varro (in Lactantius, Div. Inst., I, 6) fixes their number at 10 and arranges them in the following chronological order: Persian, Libyan, Delphic, Cimmerian, Erythraean, Samian, Cumaean, Hellespontine, Phrygian, Tiburtine. Of these and of others named by the authors, three are the principal ones: the Erythraean, by name Herophile, belonging to Ionia; the Cumaean, which is that Erythraean transported to Italy; the Babylonian (by name Sabitu or Sambethe), unknown to Varro and which came into vogue during the Hellenistic age as a reaction of the East to Roman dominion.

II. THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS IN ROME

They are almost certainly of Etruscan origin, and thanks to an Etruscan king — Tarquinius Priscus according to Varro (in Lactantius, Div. Inst., I, 6), Tarquinius Superbus according to Pliny (Nat. hist., XIII, 88) — they were introduced into Rome from Cumae, a place famous for the cult of Apollo and for the presence of the S. According to tradition, an old woman offered the King nine of these books, burning three at each refusal to purchase. The King bought the last three and had them placed in the Capitoline temple, where a special commission of duumviri, then decemviri, then quindecemviri sacris faciundis consulted them (libros adire, libros inspicere) at the invitation of the Senate. They were also called libri fatales, with clear allusion to their content (Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones, I, 6, 13).

In keeping with the rigidly legalistic spirit of Roman religion, which abhorred the enthusiastic manifestations of religious feeling, the S. in Rome was reduced in the hands of the Quindecemviri to being a written voice, interpreted, at the order of the authority, by a technically trained priesthood, in cases in which the aim was rather to calm than to intensify religious excitement «ad deponendas potius quam ad suscipiendas religiones»; that is, above all on the occasion of public natural or social calamities, so that it might suggest the way to appease the gods, thereby restoring the «pax deorum». And indeed the Sibylline books were consulted 9 times on the occasion of stones falling (meteorites), besides sporadic cases of earthquakes and famines. The remedies suggested are always of the same kind: supplications, lustrations, lectisternia, expiatory sacrifices, building of temples.

Destroyed in the fire of 83 B.C., the Senate wished them to be reconstituted and sent for that purpose an embassy to the places famous as the dwelling of the S. (Tacitus, Ann., VI, 12). This returned with about a thousand verses, which in the year 76 were deposited in the rebuilt Capitoline temple. And since falsifications of a political character had infiltrated them, Augustus had them subjected to a rigorous revision and placed them in the new temple he dedicated to Apollo on the Palatine (Suetonius, Aug., 31).

It was the Cumaean S. that announced, in accordance with the new Neo-Pythagorean ideas, the birth of a new era, which seemed to be opening then, at the end of the civil wars (Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas: Virgil, Ecl., IV, 4), in coincidence with the triumph of Augustus; it was the Sibylline books that prescribed in 17 B.C. the celebration of the secular games (Horace, Carm. saec., 5), which in Augustus's thought do-

(Int. Alimari)
SIBILLA - A Sibyl, sculpture by Giovanni Pisano (1298). Detail of the pulpit of the church of St. Andrew - Pistoia.

were meant to signify the close of a troubled era and the beginning of a new age.

The Sibylline verses had the characteristic of being acrostics, both for mnemonic reasons and as a guarantee of inalterability (Cicero, De div., II, 11). Their tenor was deliberately obscure and generic, such as to be adaptable to the most varied circumstances. They were consulted throughout the Republic and the Empire down to Julian the Apostate (Ammianus Marcellinus, XXIII, 17). Around 400 Stilicho ordered that they be burned (Rutilius Namatianus, II, 52).

Nicola Turchi

III. SIBYLLINE ORACLES

Greek historians allude to predictions attributed to the Sibyls. Their collections, entitled Χρηγοί Σιβαλλικαί, must soon have circulated; but only scanty fragments of them have come down to us (C. Alexandre [v. op. cit. in bibl.], II, pp. 118-47).

The well-defined collection handed down under the name of Sibylline Oracles has nothing to do with pagan religion. It consists of 14 books of very diverse date and origin, which exploit the name of the Sibyls for propagandistic purposes. In the attempt at literary assimilation, carried out especially by the Jews of Egypt, recourse had often been had to the expedient of presenting entire works or isolated sayings under the patronage of some celebrated Greek historian or poet. By such a literary artifice a supposed dependence of Greek civilization on the Hebrew was flaunted. The mystery that surrounded the authoritative sayings of the Sibyls facilitated this literary falsification, sometimes very shrewd, at other times rather puerile, which was begun in the 2nd century B.C. and continued into the Middle Ages.

Fourteen Sibylline books are known, comprising the oldest texts (2nd century B.C. - 4th century A.D.), whose origin cannot always be described. Books IX-X are lost, if indeed they were ever composed. The first two show in an evident manner that they are the result of a not very happy splitting of a single primitive work. Only a few verses survive of books IV, VI, VII, XIII (respectively: 192, 28, 164, 173), while some fragments remain (Geffcken reports 8, with about a hundred verses in all) of which it is not known to which book they belonged. From this it appears how their manuscript transmission offers manifold problems, increased by the difficulty of establishing the various strata in passages that are evidently interpolated.

Book III is the oldest part of the collection, according to many already begun in the time of the Maccabees (mid-2nd century B.C.). The book comprises 829 dactylic hexameters. It was composed in Greek, as even a superficial examination of the language shows. In the poetic fiction it is supposed that the Sibyl, earlier than Homer, narrates future history in a veiled manner, with many repetitions and anachronisms. The description of the tower of Babel is famous. The Jewish glories are exalted; in the prophetic style the idolatrous nations are cursed and monotheism is advocated. Messianic or eschatological elements are rare and debatable (vv. 652-68). According to some authors Virgil in his fourth eclogue would have been inspired by this book, especially at vv. 785-95, where with images similar to those of Is. 11, 6-9 he describes the messianic peace. The work seems immune from Christian interpolations, to which vv. 767-84 are sometimes assigned.

Of undoubtedly Christian origin are books VI and VII, of which the first is a brief hymn to Christ. In book VIII (500 vv.), after the feigned prophecy about the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, there is the well-known acrostic Ἰησοῦς Χρειαστὸς θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτὴρ-σταυρός (vv. 217-50), of which St. Augustine speaks at length (De civitate Dei, XVIII, 23), who reports its Latin translation and attributes it to the Erythraean or Cumaean Sibyl. The emperor Constantine (Oratio ad sanctum coetum, 18-19: PG 20, 1285-92) not only cites the acrostic, but defends its authenticity attributed to the Erythraean Sibyl, affirming that it was already translated into Latin by Cicero. The assertion probably depends on having misunderstood a text of the De divinatione (II, 54). Book XIII (vv. 173) is also Christian, and speaks of the Roman emperors down to Gallienus. Books XI (vv. 324), XII (vv. 299) and XIV (vv. 361), of scant historical interest, are the work of Jews, but with notable reworkings and Christian interpolations. These, which certainly are not earlier than the 2nd-3rd century A.D., show how in that period there was a revival of the Jewish Sibyl with an anti-Christian polemical intent. In a later period still other isolated poems arose, attributed in particular to the Tiburtine Sibyl.

The influence of the Sibylline Oracles was more literary and artistic than ideological. Ancient ecclesiastical writers, in particular Clement of Alexandria, Theophilus of Antioch and Lactantius, who has an entire chapter De divinis testimoniis et de Sibyllis et earum carminibus (Divinae institutiones, I, 6), often had recourse to the Sibylline texts to prove the messianic expectation among the pagans. An allusion to their eschatological passages is still found in the well-known verse Texte David cum Sibylla of the Dies irae (cf. Orac. sibill., IV, 172-79).

Angelo Penna

IV. SIBYL IN ART

Representations of the Sibyls in sacred art appear in the late Middle Ages and are frequent in the Renaissance period. Later the practice gradually fell into disuse. The Sibyls are always depicted as prophetesses, often in correspondence with and near biblical prophets. Usually they are seen in the act of reading the magic Sibylline books, or else with books in hand. Books are an iconographic attribute indicative of the Sibyls, who sometimes have scrolls analogous to those of the prophets.

It seems that the oldest Sibyl to appear in sacred art is the Persian one, painted in the 11th century among the series of prophets in a pendentive of the church of S. Angelo in Formis; subsequently a Sibyl appears carved in bas-relief in the pulpit of Sessa Aurunca (12th-13th century). The most remarkable representation of the Sibyls that has come down to us from the late Middle Ages is due to Giovanni Pisano, who adorned with them both his pulpit of the cathedral of Pisa and that of the church of S. Andrea at Pistoia, placing them above the capitals of the small columns that support the pulpits themselves.

At the dawn of the Renaissance, Beato Angelico painted the Erythraean Sibyl alone in the midst of the entire series of prophets in the frame of the great Crucifixion, frescoed in the chapter hall of the Convent of S. Marco in Florence. From Andrea del Castagno there is at the same time the vigorous Cumaean Sibyl, frescoed in its time in the Villa Pandolfini at Legnaia and now preserved in the convent of S. Apollonia in Florence. Four graceful statuettes of Sibyls (perhaps by Pier Matteo d'Amelia) are seen interspersed with those of the prophets in the vertical friezes of the magnificent door of the Florentine Baptistery known as that of Paradise, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti. In the splendid floor of the cathedral of Siena, decorated with marble graffiti, ten Sibyls are depicted in the side aisles according to the designs of various masters in the late fifteenth century. Domenico Ghirlandaio frescoed in 1484 four Sibyls in the triangular compartments of the vault of the Sassetti chapel in the church of the

S.ma Trinità in Florence. In the same scattered arrangement four Sibyls are seen in the vault of the Baglioni chapel of the collegiate church in Spello, frescoed there in 1501 by Pinturicchio, who likewise adorned with four Sibyls the ceiling decoration of the apse of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, executed by him in 1508. The Sibyls and the prophets, painted in the Borgia apartment in the Vatican Palace, are the work of Pinturicchio's workshop. On the walls of the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia, Perugino painted six Sibyls together with six prophets, beneath God the Father in Glory; among these Sibyls one, namely the Libyan, is attributed to the collaboration of the young Raphael.

The most famous depiction of the Sibyls is certainly that of Michelangelo (v.), frescoed on the vault of the Sistine Chapel; five of them (Erythraean, Persian, Delphic, Cumaean and Libyan) are seen there alternating with seven prophets. Two years later than the Sistine vault is Raphael's fresco in the church of S. Maria della Pace in Rome, where four Sibyls (Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian and Tiburtine) are grouped with several putti in a harmonious elegiac scene. On the vault of the Caraffa chapel in the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome there are four Sibyls painted in the early sixteenth century by Raffaellino del Garbo. In the church of Fontegiusta in Siena a fresco by Baldassarre Peruzzi, datable to 1528, depicts the Tiburtine Sibyl announcing to the emperor Augustus the birth of Our Lord. The mediocre Sibyl, sculpted in marble by Raffaello da Montelupo, which is seen in the upper part of the tomb monument of Julius II, in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, seems the last depiction of the ancient prophetesses in sacred art. Also noteworthy is the splendid painting by D. Dossi with the Maga Circe, conceived as a grandiose image of a Sibyl, which is preserved in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. - See pl. XXIX.

Witold Wehr