Sibylline Oracles

Sibylline Oracles

At the close of the 5th (6th?) cent. Gospel (cf. vol. i. p. 489) which is entitled The History of Joseph the Carpenter, the Saviour predicts that Antichrist will murder four persons and shed their blood like water, in revenge for their exposure of his evil policy. The apostles ask who these four persons are, and the Lord replies, They are Enoch, Elijah, Schila, and Tabitha. Schila has puzzled editors of this Arabic document. It is commonly taken as a mans name, and he has been identified with the NT Silas, although there is no obvious reason either in the NT or in later tradition why Silas should be in such exalted company. E. Nestle (ZNTW [Note: NTW Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft.] xi. [1910] 240) suggests that he was the son of the widow of Nain; but this is pure conjecture, and Nestles companion idea that Tabitha represents the daughter of Jairus (Mar 5:41, ) is a precarious support. Tabitha is certainly the woman of Joppa (Act 9:36-41) whom St. Peter raised from the dead. In the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah she encounters Antichrist, and in a fragment of some Sahidic apocalypse, quoted by Crum (ZNTW [Note: NTW Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft.] xii. [1911] 352), she is ranked with Enoch and Elijah as having entered heaven in the body. Crum further solves the problem of Schila by noting that when the Arabic noun is pointed differently it becomes equivalent to Sibylla, who is elsewhere associated with Enoch. This yields an excellent sense for the passage, two men being followed by two women.

But what is the Sibyl, a pagan figure, doing in this Christian connexion? How did she come to till so strange a rle? The answer to these questions is the subject of the present article.

The etymology of the word Sibyl is a disputed point. (a) The oldest derivation is the attractive one given by Varro (quoted in Lact. Div. Inst. i. 6), that the term is a generic title for prophetesses, which comes from the Doric or aeolic = , and () = , i.e. the counsel of God. (b) J. P. Postgate (AJPh [Note: JPh American Journal of Philology.] iii. [1882] 333-334), unable to accept (a), since is Laconian, not aeolic, and since the loss of an accented syllable is unlikely, prefers the roots — (the feminine suffix) = the wise (little) woman, the suffix – being used in a diminutive sense, and – being connected with sap, to be wise. (c) The idea of wisdom is brought in by those philologists, like Max Mller (Lectures on the Science of Language, new ed., London, 1882, vol. i. p. 109), who connect with a primitive Italian sabus or sabius, wise; but there is no trace of this Italian term as the origin of the diminutive, and Sibulla does not seem to occur in any Italian dialect. (d) E. Hofmann (see below) accepts the first part of (a), but makes the word a composite from and = (), meaning God-appeasing, or God-reconciling, with reference to the aim of the primitive Sibylline oracles. Others find the thought of age dominant and (e), like S. Krauss, derive it from sib-il, the ancient of God, sib or ib = old, and – as in , for which the inscriptions furnish the form Bb-il (Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xi. [1902] 122), or (f), like H. Lewy in Philologus, lvii. [1898] 350 f., connect with the Semitic (Aramaic) root of sbet, grandmother, although this leaves the reduplication of the unexplained. None of these, or of the other ancient and modern etymologies which have been proposed, is satisfactory. occurs as a womans name in an Attic inscription from the 4th cent. b.c., but, while this suggests that Sibyl may have been a proper name to begin with, it is insufficient to prove that Sibyl was a Greek term, not an Oriental. Eventually the name was applied la any woman or prophetic gifts, according to Servius (on aen. iii. 445: Sibylla dicitur omnis puella cuius pectus numen recipit) and Suidas ( ). But originally it was restricted to a small class or prophetesses, whom we may call:

1. The classical Sibyl(s).-Towards the end of the 6th, or about the beginning of the 5th, cent. b.c., the foundation of the Capitoline temple in Rome was associated with the influence of Sibylline utterances and the infusion of Greek rites (Graecus ritus) into Roman religion. The origin of these was Eastern. During the 6th cent. Greece was not only full of Orphism and Pythagoreanism, but of floating oracular dicta believed to emanate from a mystic female figure, a weird figure of whom it is hard to say how far she was human or divine; and of whose origin we know nothing, except that her original home was, as we might expect, Asia Minor (W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People, London, 1911, p. 257). This was the Sibyl. Like the Pythia, she was a woman, considered to be inspired by Apollo. Subsequently, she was supposed to be extremely old, on the principle, probably, that long experience added to her prophetic capacities. As time went on, her personality multiplied; in the 4th cent. b.c. Heraclides Ponticus, the historian, knew of three, and Varro reckoned as many as ten [Note: The variant tradition of nine reached Shakespeare. The Bastard in King Henry VI. (pt. i. act i. scene ii. lines 55-57), describing Joan of Arc, says:

The spirit of deep prophecy she hath,

Exceeding the nine sibyls of old Rome:

Whats past and whats to come she can descry.] Sibyls. Primitive tradition located the original Sibyl at Erythrae, but the most famous Sibyl resided at Cumae, the old Greek settlement in Campania, though it is probable that the Sibylline oracles which came to Rome from Cumae had reached the latter city from Erythrae. [Note: Emmanuel Hofmanns paper on Die tarquinischen Sibyllen-bcher in Rheinisches Museum fr Philologie, new ser., 1. [1895] 90-113.] The Roman collection, which legend linked to the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, perished in the Capitol fire of 83 b.c. But they had become too important for the purposes of religion to be lost, and a commission of three State officials replaced them by a fresh collection of a thousand verses, gathered from Erythrae, Samos, Ilium, Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere. Instructions were given that only genuine productions were to be admitted to thus new edition of the libri Sibyllini or libri fatales. [Note: According to some recent critics, e.g. F. Kampers (in Histor. Zeitschrift, 1908, p. 252f.), the new harvest of Sibyllina included some Jewish Alexandrian productions, which influenced Vergil. See. further, J. B. Mayors paper in the Exp. 7th ser. iii. [1907] 289 ff.] But such precautions as were taken do not seem to have been more than partially successful. Oracles of this kind absorbed forgeries of a more or less political aim, and the authorized collection had to be purged from time to time. In 13 b.c. Augustus included this among his religious reforms, and Tiberius had to prevent an anonymous Sibylline book from being added to the list; the Emperor showed himself more sceptical than the quindecimuiri sacris faciundis, [Note: When his patrons son was elected to this board of officials, Tibullus (ii. 5) wrote a pcem for the occasion, in which he invokes PhCEbus Apollo, under whose guidance the Sibyl has never played the Romans false, singing Fates secrets in hexameters (15 f.).] who were officially responsible for the interpretation of the oracles and for the application of their mysterious commands to the national life. In times of disaster and misfortune, or when prodigies occurred, the Romans turned to this sacred collection. Whatever measures it dictated-fasts, feasts, expiations, or the like-were carried out with trembling, anxious care, as during the panic roused by Hannibals campaign in Northern Italy. The Sibylline collection met, or was skilfully manipulated to meet, the popular appetite for appeasing the supernatural, which prodigies and defeats created from time to time. These Roman oracles originally were not so much predictions of woes to come, like apocalyptic tracts, as explanations of what was required to avert the anger of the gods and ward off evil to the State on earth. They were not vaticinia but remedia Sibyllina, as Pliny puts it (Historia Naturalis (Pliny) xi. 35). They were also esoteric literature; the consent of the Senate was required before a line of their contents could be divulged to the general public. This put considerable power into the hands of the officials who had charge of them, especially as the obscurity of their contents made the sense of certain passages conveniently ambiguous, and it is not surprising to find that, as time went on, their reputation suffered in the same way as the Greek oracles; the Roman, like the Greek, Sibyllina might philippize; genuine lines might be interpreted for private ends, if a political leader could influence the expositors, and forged lines could be surreptitiously introduced. Still, for two centuries at least, these oracles had a singular power over the religious hopes and fears of the people. An odd story like that preserved by Petronius [Note: His drunken hero, Trimalchio (Satyricon, 48), alleges, I once saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a cage at Cumae, and when the boys called to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied, I want to die. ] in the 1st cent. a.d. must not be allowed to count unduly against the esteem which was still felt for the oracles. But their influence was upon the wane. Thus, in a.d. 270, when the Alemanni invaded Italy, the Senate hesitated to consult the Sibyllina, and Aurelian had to incite them (Vopiscus, Vita Aureliani, 20); the Emperor taunted them with behaving as if they were in a Christian church-a significant indication of the changed attitude towards these oracles! Their use lingered down to the age of Julian. Then the Christian reaction proved fatal to them, and Stilicho is said to have burned the entire official collection at the beginning of the 5th century. His action was bitterly resented, as we can see from the indignant verses of Rutilius Numantianus, but the protect did not affect the fact; Stilichos action had made it impossible for the authorities to appeal in future to this ancient relic of pagan divination. [Note: On the whole subject, see G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Rmer, Munich, 1902. pp. 462-475, and W. Buchholzs article in Roscher, pp. 790-813, with the penetrating discussion in A. Bouch-Leclercqs Histoire de la divination dans lantiquit, 4 vols., Paris, 1879-81, ii. 199 f.]

Besides the official collection, however, Sibylline oracles passed current in large numbers among the people. Lactantius, who has preserved several important data on the subject, declares that only the Cumaean Sibyls oracles, amounting to three books, were kept secret, [Note: Justin (Apol. i. 44) denounces this as a device of evil demons, to prevent men from reading evidence for the truth of God!] while the writings of the other Sibyls for the most part circulated freely. It is true, as we have seen, that the very diffusion of such verses led to the partial discrediting of the entire literature as a religious authority of impartial value, but long before this shadow fell upon the Sibyllina at Rome the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria had taken advantage of the current Sibylline verse as a literary genre and started a new, ingenious development of the method.

2. The Jewish Sibylline oracles.-We come upon Jewish Sibylline oracles before we hear of a Jewish Sibyl. The latter is first mentioned by Alexander Polyhistor, the Greek author of , in the 1st cent. b.c., who quotes what is apparently an oracle still extant in Sib. Orac. iii. 97 ff. It is necessary to say apparently, for serious doubts have been thrown recently upon Alexanders indebtedness to a Jewish source; both Geffcken [Note: In his Komposition und Entstehungszeit der Oracula Sibyllina (TU xxiii. 1 [1902] 2 f.).] and Bousset [Note: In an essay in E. Preuschens ZNTW iii. [1902] 23-49.] prefer to find traces of a Babylonian (Greek) Sibylline oracle, and Schrers criticism of this theory does not succeed in ruling it out of court. The exact relations between the Jewish Sibyl and the Chaldaean have not yet been cleared up. Pausanias vouches for four Sibyls, the Erythraean Herophile, the Cumaean Demo, a Libyan prophetess, and subsequent to Demo, an oracular woman among the Hebrews, named Sabbe; Berosus is said to have been the father, Erymanthes the mother, of Sabbe, Some call her the Babylonian, others the Egyptian Sibyl (x. 12). A later variant for Sabbe is Sambethe, which is variously explained. But among these uncertainties the fact shines clear, that by the 2nd cent. b.c. the literary method of the Sibylline oracles had been exploited by one or more Jewish authors at Alexandria, in the interests of religious apologetic and propaganda. Like the older Philo, Theodotus, and possibly the author of the pseudo-Phocylidaean verses, the Jews who composed these Sibylline oracles of their own could write Greek hexameters. [Note: The language of prophecy naturally assumes a metrical or rhythmical form, partly as an aid to the memory, partly, perhaps, as a means of giving to the words uttered the effect of perhaps, as a means of giving to the words uttered the effect of a more solemn intonation (W. Y. Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic, Oxford, 1905, p. 34); cf. ERE iv. 798a.] They chose this pagan form in order not only to convey threats of doom against persecuting powers like Assyria and Rome, but also to win a hearing among outside circles for their own monotheism and moralism. Why should not the Sibyl, this recognized exponent of Divine things, voice the true inspiration of Israel as well as the secondary revelation of the nations? Why should not this authoritative channel convey the living water of Jewish truth, or rather of truth as only the Jews knew it? And so this form of pseudonymous literature came into vogue. [Note: A. Hilgenfelds Jdische Apokalyptik, Jens, 1857, p. 51 f. Ewalds Abhandlung ber Entstehung, Inhalt, und Werth der sibyllinischen Bcher, Gttingen, 1858; B. W. Badts essay De oraculis sibyllinis a Judaeis compositis, Breslau, 1869; and J. Liegers Die jdische Sibylle, griechisch und deutsch mit erklrenden Anmerkungen, Vienna, 1908; in addition to the prefaces of critical editors like Alexandre and Friedlieb. The bulk of bk. iii. goes back to the 2nd cent. b.c.; nuclei seem to gather round 170 b.c. and 140 b.c.]

But the vogue did not last very long. The same fate befell the Sibylline oracles of Judaism that befell the apocalypses: their popularity with the early Christian Church appears to have thrown them out of favour with the officials of Rabbinic Judaism.|| [Note: | Even Josephus only once refers to the Sibyllina, to the oracle of iii. 97 f. about the tower of Babel (Ant. i. 4).] The Church appropriated them, appealed to them, edited them in her own interests, composed fresh ones, and, in general, treated the Jewish Sibylline oracles much as the Alexandrian Jews had treated the pagan ones. It is true that the composition of Jewish Sibyllines continued sporadically till the reign of Marcus Aurelius at any rate, and even later. But the extant collection is due to Christians, and one of the intricate problems of this literature is to determine how far Christians have edited sources which were originally Jewish. As in the case of the apocalypses, the criteria are far from being satisfactory. The Sibylline oracles are a conglomerate of documents, ranging from the 2nd cent. b.c. to the middle of the 7th cent. a.d. Some sections (e.g. the earliest, in bk. iii.) are evidently Jewish, others as evidently Christian; hut large passages seem to show no distinct soil in one or the other religion. Some of them are not definitely pre-Christian, and even those that are to be dated in the Christian era may be Jewish compositions worked over by a Christian hand.

An instance of the difficulty of deciding whether a passage of the Sibyllina was written by a Jew or by a Christian is afforded by the first of the fragments which Theophilus of Antioch has preserved (ad Autol. ii. 36):

O mortal men of flesh, mere things of nought,

How quick your pride, regardless or lifes end!

Have ye no fear of God, who knows each thought,

Who sees all, rules all, [Note: , almost in the sense of Wis 1:6 (= scrutator) or 1Pe 2:25 (overseer).] who doth all transcend,

Nourishing all he made, and in all men

Sets the sweat [Note: As below (p. 485) in bk. vi. Blass prefers to render, who set the sweet breath of life in everything, and made man director of all things.] Spirit to direct their ways?

One God there is, Lord above mortal ken,

Unborn, alone in power, from mortal gaze

Hidden himself, who yet beholdeth all.

The immortal God no eye of flesh can view,

Who dwells above, the heavenly God, the true;

For mortal nerves will weakly flinch and fall

Even before the suns refulgent ball. [Note: This ancient argument is applied in the Epistle of Barnabas (v. 9 f.) to the Incarnation specifically: He manifested Himself as Gods Son. For, had He not come in the flesh, how could men ever have been saved by beholding Him, since they are unable to gaze directly at the rays of the sun, which is destined to perish and is the work of His hands?]

Ah, worship him who oer the world holds sway,

Unborn, eternal, self-created Being,

Sustaining Lord, who in our common day [Note: , a frequent phrase in the Sibyllina.]

Assigns to mortals each the power of seeing. [Note: e., apparently, of recognizing Himself, But is difficult in this sense. To take it as meaning that God constantly judges men in the present, not simply in the future, is a possible, though less probable, alternative.]

Bitterly for ill error shall ye pay,

For all forsaking of his altars true,

For hecatombs and offerings ye lay

On altars of dead idols as their due.

Besotted, proud, ye left the straight highway

To wander blindly among thorns; ah, cease.

Cease, oh ye foolish men, to roam astray,

From darkness and black night seek ye release,

Lay hold upon the Light, [Note: If this alludes to Christ, the authorship is plain. To take it as a reference to the sun is possible, but less likely. The same difficulty emerges in the interpretation of iii. 95 f.] unerring, clear,

For all to mark his presence now and here.

Turn not for ever to the murky night:

When lo the suns sweet rays are shining bright!

Be wise at heart, be wise and understand:

There in one God, who sends upon the land

The rain, the wind, the lightning and the might

Of earthquake, famine, pestilence, and wce,

Sad wce that weighs the heart, the had, the snow,-

All, [Note: Literally, why detail each one by one?-a common phrase of the Sibyl, in breaking off a list.] all are his, who reigns over his own,

Sovereign of heaven and earth himself alone.

A passage like this breathes so much of the monotheistic moralism which was common to Orphism, Judaism, and Christianity that we have no definite criteria for assigning it to either a Jewish or a Christian Sibyllinist; either might have written it, subordinating his dogmatic idiosyncrasies to the need of preserving the dramatic probabilities of the situation. The spirit of the piece is deliberately neutral. On the other hand, there can be no doubt with regard to a passage like this from bk. iii. 263 ff., which describes the fortunes of the twelve tribes:

To them alone a hundred told the field

Bears harvest, and Gods measures ample yield.

Yet even they shall fare amiss, even they

Shall suffer pestilence. Thou, [Note: Suddenly apostrophizing the Jewish people.] far away

From thy fair shrine shalt flee, for tis thy fate

To leave thy sacred soil all desolate;

Borne to Assyria, thou shalt there behold

Thy wives and children into slavery sold,

And greedy hands despoiling all thy gold.

Thou shalt fill every country, every sea,

And at thy customs all shall angry be. [Note: The well-known anti-Semitic prejudice which echoes through Latin literature. See H. Strongs paragraphs in HJ xiii. [1915] 306 f.; he points out how, e.g., the Jewish objection to pork must have irritated Romans, as pork was their favourite animal food.]

But thy land shall be empty, down shall fall

The great Gods shrine and altar, the long wall,

Since God immortal thou wouldst not obey,

But from his holy law didst swerve and stray,

Since wretched idols were the hearts desire,

Careless in reverence for the immortal Sire

Of gods and men, who worship doth require.

Wherefore thy wondrous shrine, thy fruitful land

For seventy years [Note: From Jer 25:12.] untouched by thee shall stand.

Yet at the end shall bliss and glory great

Be thine, as God has ordered: only wait

We have thus three strata in the medley of the extant Sibyllina: (1) the pagan (Greek or Babylonian) oracles, which came into the hands of Jews and eventually of Christians. It is one of the many services rendered to the criticism of the oracles by Geffcken, their latest editor, that he has distinguished more fully than any of his predecessors the presence of such outside sources throughout the collection; even although the evidence in occasionally unsatisfactory, there can be little doubt that the later Jewish and Christian Sibyllinists made more use of these surviving fragments than scholars formerly were disposed to admit; [Note: See below, p. 486. In viii. 361, 373, two lines are quoted from a Delphic oracle which happens to be preserved by Herodotus (i. 47). Hermas (see below) hears terrible news from his Sibyl, followed by gentle, gracious promises, and Rendel Harris (The Homeric Centones, London, 1898, p. 15 f.) conjectures that the former were an intimation of the impending ruin of Rome, something like what we find in the eight book of the Sibylline Oracles. But this would be Jewish. The couplet in iv. 97-98 is indubitably pagan; Strabo quotes it as such.] (2) the Jewish Sibyllines, rising in Alexandria not lone after the invasion of Egypt by Antiochus Epiphanes in 171-169 b.c. The literary method was to imitate [Note: The pseudo-oracular, as F. W. H. Myers puts it, is a style which has in all ages been cultivated with success (Hellenica2, London, 1898, p. 411).] the pagan oracles, for the purpose of persuading or threatening the Gentiles, but occasionally fragments of them were incorporated as the nucleus of a fresh composition, and more or less edited for their new setting; (3) the Christian Sibyllines, which followed the same path in dealing with their predecessors. Fresh oracles were composed, old ones were recast and Christianized. It was the Jewish composers who gave the lead to Christian in this literary method, as in the apocalyptic department of pseudepigrapha, and the production of occasional Jewish oracles went on side by side with the Christian activity, even after the Pharisaic reaction and re-organization of Judaism had eschewed the Sibyllines. But we must now turn to the third of the strata. It is the most important for our present purpose, not simply because it is Christian, but because the final editing of the oracles, as we have them, was the work of Christians. [Note: A good statement of the problem is to be found in Harnacks Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur, I. i. [Leipzig, 1893] 861 ff., II. i. [do., 1897] 581 f., ii. [do., 1904] 184 f.]

3. The Christian Sibyl.-In the early Christian literature we hear of the Sibyl before we hear of Sibylline oracles. The so-called allusions in Clement of Rome are dubious, but Hermas (Vis. II. iv.) mentions her. Justin (Apol. i. 20) quotes her, along with Hystaspes, to prove that the world would be destroyed by fire, and the author of pseudo-Justins Cohortatio ad Graecos (16), not earlier than the end of the 2nd or the beginning of the 3rd cent., not only quotes her as a primeval witness to monotheism, but (37) describes her shrine at Cumae: You will also be able easily to learn the right religion, to some extent, from the ancient Sibyl, who, under a powerful inspiration, teaches you by her oracles what seems closely akin to the doctrine of the prophets. She is said to have come from Babylon, her father being Berosus, who wrote the history of Chaldaea; after crossing over, somehow, to Campania, she uttered her oracles in a town called Cumae, six miles from Baiae, the site of the hot springs of Campania. When I was in that town, I saw a spot where I was shown a huge basilica cut out of a single block-an extraordinary and most marvellous object. According to those who had the local tradition from their fathers, it was there that she used to put forth her oracles. In the middle of the basilica I was shown three openings cut out of the same block, in which, when filled with water, she was said to have bathed; after which she would resume her robe, retire to the inner shrine of the basilica (still cut out of the same block), and in the middle of the chamber, seated on a high platform and throne, put forth her oracles. He then argues that Plato must have had this Sibyl in his mind when he described in the Phaedrus (244B) and the Meno (99C) the phenomena of prophetic frenzy or rapture, since the Sibyl did not recollect afterwards what she had said during her unconscious ecstasies. [Note: In the Sibylline oracles, the Sibyl is passive or reluctant under the influence of inspiration. This tallied with some Jewish and Christian conceptions of prophetic inspiration.] This Christian author also shares the view of Pausanias (see above) about the parentage of the Sibyl; but for our immediate purpose it is move relevant to note his appeal to her teaching on morality and monotheism. The appeal is by no means characteristic of him alone. It represents a widespread attitude, and from it there developed a Christian Sibylline literature. Christians, especially Christian apologists of the 2nd cent. like Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria, were content to upbraid the degenerate and immoral paganism of the age by holding up the purer conceptions of the ancient Sibyl, but others were attracted to the predictions and threats of the Sibylline prophecies, which seemed so analogous to the apocalyptic tracts of the Church. It was the latter interest that first started the independent composition of Sibylline verses by Christians, probably on quite a small scale. Celsus, e.g., taunts Christians on two grounds, in this connexion; they were Sibyllists, he urged, with their belief in the existence of a prophetic Sibyl and their appeal to her oracular authority (Orig, c. Cels. v. 61), and they dared to interpolate these ancient sources with impious lines of their own (vii. 53: ). It was not difficult to slip in a Christian line or alter a phrase, any more than in the case of the apocalypses of Judaism. Then came the full-blown production of such oracles by writers of the Church, partly to justify the ways of Providence, partly to enforce Christian predictions and threats, partly even to disseminate Christian doctrines. Once the fabrication of Sibyllina started, it went on from modest interpretations of a line or two to fresh pieces. The sustaining force in the composition of such oracles was drawn from the popular passion, in several Christian circles, for their pagan and Jewish prototypes. The ingenuity of Sibylline composers and the credulity of many simple Christians combined to produce our present collection.

One remarkable proof of the prestige gained by the Sibylline oracles of paganism in certain corners of the Church during the 2nd cent, is afforded by an incidental allusion in Clement of Alexandria, which proves that Some Pauline apocryphon claimed the authority of the Apostle for the Divine testimony of these primeval predictions. In the sixth book of the Stromata (ch. 5), arguing that the Greeks had some knowledge of the true God, Clement declares:

From the Hellenic discipline and also from the legal [i.e. the Jewish] discipline, those who accept faith are gathered into the one race of the saved People-not that the three peoples are separated chronologically, but that they are disciplined in different covenants of the one Lord [and instructed?] by the word of the one Lord. As it was Gods will to save the Jews by giving them prophets, so he raised up the most notable of the Greeks themselves to be prophets in their own tongue, as they were able to receive the divine bounty, and thus separated them from the vulgar crowd. This will he clear from The Preaching of Peter and also from the words of the Apostle Paul: Take the Greek books, read the Sibyl, see how the unity of God and the course of the future are shown there. Take and read Hystaspes, and you will find the Son of God far more luminously and plainly described, and how many kings will array themselves against the Christ, hating him and those who bear his name, his faithful ones, his patience and his coming.

Unfortunately Clement does not name this Pauline document, and nothing corresponding to his quotation has turned up yet in any surviving fragments of the Acta Pauli. But the Alexandrian apologists attitude brings out one distinctive feature in the Christian Sibyllina. For all their common appeal to the pagan Sibyl or Sibyls, there was one difference between the procedure of the Jewish Sibyllinists and the Christian, The former often took pains to construct a Sibyl of their own; she spoke Greek, and spoke to Greeks, but she was of Hebrew birth, She repudiates her sisters of Erythrae and Cumae. Mortals throughout Hellas will call me foreign, sprung from Erythrae, and shameless; some will say I am the Sibyl whose mother was Circe and whose father was Gnostos, a raving maniac. But when all these things come to pass, then you will remember me, and none will then call me mad, but the prophetess of mighty God (iii. 813-818; cf. iv. 1-23), The Sibyl, like Cassandra, has to prophesy to an incredulous generation. But she is of Hebrew origin, or at any rate of Babylonian. Traditions vary on her birth; in some quarters she appears to have been connected with Noah (iii. 827, I was his daughter-in-law), but it was at any rate essential to safeguard the origin of one who not only denounced idolatry but glorified the Jewish people, and there was a tendency to identify her, in one or other of her Oriental forms, with Hebrew story. The Christian Sibyllinists, on the other hard, took over the pagan Sibyl or Sibyls. Their theory of Divine inspiration working in the past outside Israel-an outcome of the finer conception of the Logos, as held by the apologists-enabled them to dispense with the construction of a new figure. It would have been much more difficult for them, in any case, to produce a Sibyl for themselves than it had been for the Hellenistic Jews of an earlier age. [Note: The traits remained the same: (a) the Sibyl was a woman; (b) her inspiration was ecstatic and frenzied; (c) she spoke in hexameters, the ordinary metrical mould for religious oracles (Plutarch, De Pyth. Orac. 9, says she was nourished by the Muses on Helicon); and (d) she was very old. The last point was sharpened for Jews and Christians. If the Sibyl was already in the far past, when Heracleitus heard of her towards the end of the 6th cent. b.c., how much more remote she would be to Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity!] The Christian Sibyl is therefore a voice rather than a figure; she is rarely so dramatic and definite as the Jewish Sibyl, except when she is made to repent of her pagan vices (see below).

The only exception to this may be found in the pages of that second-rate Bunyan of the 2nd cent., Hermas. He makes his hero receive a book of revelations from an old woman, whom he takes to be the Sibyl. But he is told in a vision that it is the Church; the Church is old, because she was created first of all things (Vis. i-ii.). This would be all the more dramatic if the setting of the vision were Cumae. [Note: I was on my way, says Hermas, (MSS); most editors alter this to .] Whether Hermas added this graphic touch or not, he certainly took over the figure of the aged Sibyl and re-shaped it as the Church, in order to suggest a medium for moral precepts and eschatological predictions. It is one of the daring touches in this religious romance, but later writers of the Church went on another line when they appropriated the Sibyl. They preferred to leave her in the far mists of Greek antiquity as an incontrovertible witness to Gods presence and purpose among the nations of pre-Christian paganism. From that coign of vantage she pours out reproof and threatening. She has little or no dramatic rle of an independent kind, till we turn aside to some corners of Egyptian Christianity, [Note: Vergil, of course, had already begun to set the Cumaean Sibyl in motion. She is more to him than a seer who is consulted. She conducts aeneas to the world of the dead, just as she does in Ovid.] where, as we saw at the beginning of this article, apocalyptic fantasy set her among the final opponents of Antichrist, among the four witnesses to Christ who herald His overthrow of death and evil. A conception of this kind could arise only in a popular Christianity which was face to face with sterner exigencies than those of the age of Hermas; but it represented the normal Christian attitude to the Sibyl as little as did Hermas. What the Church valued primarily in the Sibyl was her rhapsodies, not any actions or sufferings. She was a voice in the wilderness, and it was to the oracles which she was supposed to have voiced that Christians turned for confirmation of their hopes and beliefs.

A number of prominent early Christian Fathers ignore the Sibyl, but none of those who mention or quote her feel any need of defending this procedure. The ordinary assumption is that she is a reliable prophetess of the truth, and that her predictions of Christ and Christianity are as anthentic in their own way as the prophecies of the OT. Tertullian [Note: Ad Nationes, ii. 12: Ante enim Sibylla quam omnis litteratura exstitit. Illa scilicet Sibylla, ueri uera uates, et cuius uocabula daemoniorum uatibus induistis. Ea senario uersu in hunc sensum de Saturni prosapia et rebus eius exponit. The description recurs in the passage inserted by Codex Fuldensis in Apol. 19, but the authenticity of the addition is doubtful (cf. R. Heinzes Tertullians Apologeticum, Leipzig, 1910, p. 385 f.).] voices the general opinion when he calls her ueri uera nates. The first indication of any real [Note: Origens answer to Celsus is weak, and he never uses the Sibyl in his proofs of revelation. But he does not pronounce against the Sibyllina. Lactantius (Div. Inst. iv. 15, 26) takes much the same line of defence as Constantine.] scepticism on the part of Christians occurs in the 4th cent. oration of Constantine, ad Sanct. ccetum (18 f.). Though the speaker quotes the Sibylline oracles as a telling proof, from paganism, of the Divine origin and nature of Christ, he feels obliged to give reasons for the faith that is in him: the reasons are weaker than the faith, but the significant thing is that evidently he could not count upon an unquestioning acceptance of the oracles as inspired by God in pre-Christian Greece. He argues in this way:

The Erythraean Sibyl, who declares that she lived in the sixth generation after the floods, [Note: In bk. i. 283 f. the Sibyl distinctly says she belonged to the sixth generation after Adam!] was a priestess of Apollo; she were the sacred fillet in imitation of him whom she served, and guarded the tripod round which the serpent called; she answered those who consulted her, as her parents in their folly had devoted her to this service-a service which produced not solemn results but unseemly passions, such as are told of Daphne. However, she once swept into the shrine of that obnoxious superstition and, really filled this time with the Divine inspiration, foretold in words the Divine plan for the future, plainly disclosing the story of the descent of Jesus by the initial letters of the lines-which form an acrostic. He proceeds to quote the acrostic (see below), adding: Obviously a divine impulse inspired the maiden to foretell this. For my part, I consider her blessed who was thus chosen by the Saviour to be a prophetess of his gracious thought for us. But many people are sceptical; they allow that the Erythraean Sibyl was a seer, but they suspect that it was someone belonging to our religion, not unacquainted with the art of poetry, who composed these lines; they think they are a forgery and that they are alleged to be oracles of the Sibyl because they contain salutary moral precepts which curb sensuous indulgence and promote a sober, orderly life. It is impossible, however, to mistake the real facts of the case, for our own members have been at pains to calculate the time with care, so that no one need suspect this pcem was written alter the arrival and the condemnation ( ) of Christ or that the current view of their previous composition by the Sibyl is inaccurate.

He then appeals to the evidence of Cicero in the de Divin, ii. 54-a singularly maladroit appeal, for Cicero did not translate this acrostic [Note: The Sibylline oracle he mentions advised the Romans eum quem re vera regem habebamus, appellandum quoque esse regem, si salui esse vellemus. The Parthians could be conquered only by a king. Therefore, as this adroit partisan of Caesar put it in his oracle, let that title be given to Caesar.] into Latin, and in fact used the acrostic form of the Sibylline verses to disprove the assertion that the Sibyl spoke in ecstatic frenzy; acrostics, as he observed, are not the product of a frenzied intellect, pouring out impromptu inspiration. Eusebius, or whoever wrote this speech for the Emperor, felt, however, that the Sibyllina afforded too telling a proof of Christianity to be surrendered. The uncritical spirit prevailed over the doubts of more intelligent Christians and the ridicule poured by pagans on this manufactured product. The Sibyllina were read, and they continued to be written.

From what has been said, it will be gathered that no Sibylline oracles of Christian origin are contemporary with the Apostolic Age. We do not possess any definite evidence as to the period when such compositions began to appear in Christian circles, apart from the insertion of lines here and there in extant Jewish oracles, which preceded independent Sibylline composition. But it can hardly have been much, if at all, earlier than the end of the 2nd cent. that the Churchs interest in the Sibyl became creative. All the sections which are specifically Christian, in the present collection, are quite post-apostolic; some may be earlier than the 3rd cent., but none has a sure claim to be reckoned as belonging to the 2nd century. The result is that we are left with the paradox that those Sibylline oracles which, strictly speaking, are relevant to this Dictionary are all of Jewish origin, i.e. the familiar oracles embedded in books iii-v especially, illustrating the apocalyptic and eschatological traditions [Note: g. the belief in Nero redivivus or at any rate redux, which echoes through bks. iv., v., and viii., and which sounds behind the Apocalypse of John.] which operated in some circles of contemporary piety. These Jewish oracles the present writer does not propose to discuss. They are accessible, and for the most part intelligible, thanks to the research which for over a century has been devoted to this branch of our subject. [Note: Besides the translations mentioned in the Literature (below), the English reader will find critical discussions in S. Krausss. article (JE xi. 319-323), W. J. Deanes Pseudepigrapha, London, 1891, pp. 276-344, Boussets article in the Eng. tr. of Herzog (vol. x. pp. 396-400), J. H. Luptons art. In Smiths DCB iv. 644-649, a paper by S. A. Hirsch in the JQR ii. [1890] 406-429, and-for the religious ideas-James Drummonds Philo Judaeus, 2 vols., London, 1888, i. 167 ff., and R. H. Charles, in EBi i. 245-250.] It is the rest of the Sibyllines which are unfamiliar to the ordinary student, even of Church history; they are not easily accessible, and they are by no means clear, but they represent so curious and baffling a phase of early Christian literature and popular feeling, on its romantic side, that it will be of some service even to call attention to the problems which they still contain, and to the phenomena of their origin. In surveying these Sibyllina we enter a by-way of early Christian literature, but it is a by-way which, like that of the uncanonical gospels, though never to the same extent, was once thronged and popular.

In Geffckens standard edition of the text (see Literature), apart from a prose prologue and some brief, scattered fragments, the extant collection contains fourteen books. Nothing from the ninth and tenth has been preserved, but the other twelve amount to 4146 lines (400, 347, 829, 192, 531, 28, 162, 500, 324, 299, 173, 361), and there are some obvious lacunae in the text. The present form of the collection probably goes back in the main to the anonymous Byzantine Greek who wrote the prologue some time in the course of the 6th century. This prologue is a rough piece of work. It repeats some current legends about the Sibyl and Sibylline oracles, but its structure is loose. This may be due to later interpolations, or the text may have suffered at the hands of scribes. Even so, however, it shows more good will than critical ability in the writer. He is a simple, credulous Christian, who undertakes the literary task of collecting and arranging the Sibyllina because he desires to aid Christian piety. The contents of the prologue are as follows:

If toil spent on reading Greet books yields rich profit to those who labour at it, inasmuch as it has the power of making scholars of those who toil thus, it is far more fitting for the rightminded to devote themselves at all times to the divine scriptures, inasmuch as they treat of God and of what issues in spiritual profit; this yields a twofold gain, for people can thereby profit themselves and also those whom they come across. Hence it was that I myself resolved to take the oracles which are called Sibylline, and which are to be found here and there, read in confusion and indistinctly understood, and to publish them in connected and orderly form, so that they may be readily grasped by the reader and yield him their profit (for they contain no small amount of what is essential and useful), thus rendering the study of them at once more rich and varied. For they impart clear information about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the divine and life-imparting trinity, as well as about the incarnation of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, about his birth from a pure virgin, about the cures performed by him, likewise about his life-giving Passion and his resurrection from the dead on the third day, about the judgment to come and the recompense for what we all have done in this life, Besides, they treat clearly of what is disclosed in the writings of Moses and the books of the prophets about the creation of the world, the formation of man, the expulsion from paradise, and the re-forming; [Note: , the new creation in contrast to , which has just been used.] they foretell what has taken place, and perhaps what is to take place, in various ways. In a word, they can be of no small service to those who come across them.

Sibyl is a Roman term, meaning prophetess or seer; hence female seers were called by this single name. There were Sibyls, as many writers tell us, in different ages and localities, to the number of ten; first, the Chaldaean or Persian, whose proper name was Sambethe, belonging to the race of the most blessed Noah, and said to have foretold the events connected with Alexander the Macedonian; she is mentioned by Nicanor the biographer of Alexander. Second, the Libyan sibyl, mentioned by Euripides in the prologue to the Lamia. Third, the Delphic, born at Delphi, of whom Chrysippus speaks in his book upon the deity (divination?). Fourth, the Italian sibyl of Cimmeria in Italy, the mother of Evander, who founded the shrine of Pan in Rome called the Lupercal. Fifth, the Erythraean sibyl, who predicted the Trojan war; Apollodorus the Erythraean vouches for her. Sixth, the Samian sibyl, whose proper name was Phyto; Eratosthenes has written of her. Seventh, the Cumaean sibyl called Amalthea and also Herophile, by some Taraxandra; Vergil [aen. vi. 36) calls the Cumaean sibyl Deiphobe, the daughter of Glaucus. Eighth, the Hellespontine sibyl, born at the village of Marpessus near the town of Gergition, in the district of the Troad, during the days of Solon and Cyrus, as Heraclides Ponticus writes. Ninth, the Phrygian, and tenth, the Tiburtine sibyl, called Albunea. [Note: This paragraph is practically a reproduction of Varros account, which Lactantius (Div. Inst. i. 6) had preserved.]

The story goes that the Cumaean sibyl brought nine books of her own oracles to Tarquinius Priscus, who was then king of the Roman State, asking three hundred pounds for them. As she was treated with contempt and not even asked what their contents were, she committed three of them to the flames. On her next visit to the king, she brought the six books and demanded the same price for them, but was treated with disdain, and burned other three. Following this up with a third visit, she brought the remaining three and asked the same price for them, declaring that if she did not get it she would burn them also. Then the king-so the story goes-read them, and in astonishment gave her a hundred pounds for them and demanded the rest of the books; she reported that she had none equivalent to what had been burnt and that no such oracles were attainable apart from ecstasy, but that certain persons in various towns and localities had received oracles which they judged essential and profitable, and that a collection of these should be made. This was done speedily. What God had given in secret did not escape notice. The books of all the sibyls were deposited in the Capitol in ancient Rome, those of the sibyl of Cumae being kept secret and not communicated to the people, as they announced rather specifically and distinctly what was to happen in Italy; the other books were made known to all. The predictions of the Erythraean sibyl have the local name prefixed to them, whereas the others have no indication of their origin, but lie mixed up together.

Now Firmianus, [Note: He means, of course, the great Christian apologist, L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius. Some idea of our authors historical knowledge may be inferred from his remark that Lactantius had been a pagan priest of the Capitoline temple!] a philosopher of no small repute and a priest of the aforesaid Capitol, opened his eyes to Christ, our eternal light, and in his writings set forth what had been said by the sibyls about the unspeakable Glory, and thereby refuted with effect the folly of the Greek error. His powerful explanation was in the Ausonian tongue, whereas the Sibylline verses were in the Greek language. Lest this should be deemed incredible, I shall bring forward the following evidence from the man who has just been mentioned. [Note: The loose quotation from Lactantius (Div. Inst. i. 6) does not begin till after the passage in brackets, which our author seems to have reproduced freely by an error of memory from the Cohortatio ad Graecos.] (Since the Sibyllines current among us are despised as common by those who understand Greek topics-what is uncommon being only counted of any value-and since people are the slower to believe in them as the lines do not all observe the accurate laws of metre, this latter is not the fault of the prophetess but of those who took them down, either because they could not keep up with the rush of what was said, or because they were uneducated; [Note: This is the Christians attempt to answer the educated Romans objection to the obscurity and irregularity of the Christian Sibyllina. So far from being a mark of weakness, this really proves their authenticity and inspired origin!] as for the prophetess, her memory of what she had said ceased with the period of ecstasy. This was what Plato [Note: See above, p. 480. Both passages expound the validity of rapture as a means of divination and insight, but the Sibyl is only mentioned in the Phaedrus, where Socrates contends that the greatest blessings come to us by way of madness () if only it is bestowed by heaven. Why, the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona have done many a noble service to Hellas, both to individuals and to the public, by their madness, whereas they have done little or nothing in their sober senses. And further, we should only be elaborating what is known to everybody, if we were to speak of the Sibyl and all the rest, who by the exercise of inspired divination have set many people right for what lay before them, by disclosing to them much of the future.] had in mind when he wrote that many important things were accomplished by those who did not know what they were saying.) So I shall quote as much as possible from the oracles brought to Rome by the envoys. The following was written of the supreme God:

One God, who rules alone, almighty, uncreated

One God there is alone, high over all, who made

the heaven, the sun and stars and moon,

the fruitful earth, the swellings of the sea;

he only is Creator God, all-strong,

he fixed our mould of being, and twas he

blended the nature of each human life.

Which means either that when human beings come together, they become one flesh with the Father, or that he fashioned man and the world under heaven out of the four elements which are opposed to one another.

There is a close affinity between this prologue and a theosophy of the 5th cent. (474-491), which originally contained seven books on the orthodox faith, employing the Sibylline oracles amongst other pagan sources to illustrate Christian doctrine. In a fragment recently discovered by Karl Mras (Eine neuentdeckte Sibyllen-Theosophie, Wiener Studien, xxviii. [1906] 43-83), the author appears to have drawn his quotation from Lactantius in part, but he had not our extant Sibylline collection before him, and Mras conjectures that the author of our prologue borrowed from this theosophy. There it nothing in the prologue to contradict this view; it is a dishevelled piece of writing, and neither original nor reliable. However the compiler made up his collection, its condition does not increase our respect for his literary capacities. What his ideas of connexion and order may have been, we have no means of telling. The arrangement of the following oracles is not chronological-possibly we have no right to expect that-but it is not even topical. The least unsatisfactory method of dealing with the materials will be to survey rapidly each book in the sequence of the collection.

Bks. i and ii form a unity, but they are not by any means the earliest part of the collection, and it is almost certain that they represent a Jewish basis overlaid by Christian additions at several points. They appear to have been unknown to early Christian writers; the first echo occurs in the Oratio ad sanct. ccetum (18 = Sib. i. 283 f.), which is attributed to Constantine. This does not militate against H. Dechents view [Note: In his monograph, Ueber das erste, zweite und elfte Buch der sibyllinischen Weissagungen, Frankfort, 1873.] that the Jewish piece which he disentangles from i. 1-323, ii. 6-33, 154-178, 185-189, 193-241, 253-311, 314-325 (327) was composed before the fall of Jerusalem, but it does tell against any early date [Note: According to Bousset, the Christian editor of bk. viii., the author of iii. 63-92, and the editor of i.-ii. all wrote in the 3rd cent., under Odenathus. This would follow necessarily, if the widow of iii. 77f. were Zenobia, not Cleopatra, and if the Assyrian whom the twelve tribes return from the East to punish (ii. 167 f.) were Odenathus. Bleek relegated i.-ii. to the 5th cent. (middle), Ewald to the 4th, Alexandre to the 3rd, and Friedlieb to the 2nd.] for the Christian editing. In bk. i the Sibyl describes the Creation and the Flood, and then, in genuinely prophetic style, carries the story down to the rebellion of the Titans (1-323), when suddenly the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the punishment of the disobedient Hebrews, are described; the book ends with a prediction of the capture of the Temple at Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews under the wrath of God for having maltreated His Son. Several passages in this Christian section are almost verbally identical with lines of the eighth book, and it is still a vexed question which book borrowed from the other.

In the Jewish oracle, which, like nearly all the Sibyllina, is a mine of odd lore about contemporary traditions and legends, the most interesting feature is the detailed description of Noah as a preacher of righteousness (2Pe 2:5) to his scornful generation (147 ff.). He preaches a short, good sermon. God reveals to him the impending fate of mankind, if they persist in their evil ways, and bids him appeal to them for the last time. Noah does so, but is scoffed at. He renews his warning, and, instead of being couched in any threatening tones, [Note: Such as, e.g., we hear in the oracle of iii. 55f., where the bitter irony of denunciation overpowers the speaker. Wce is me, alas! when shall that Day arrive, the judgment of the immortal God, the great King? Meantime, o ye cities, get founded, get all adorned with temples, race-courses, market-places, statues of gold and silver, and stone, so that ye may come to the bitter Day! For come it will, whenever the smell of brimstone pervades all men.] it is charged with a singular pathos. He tells them, e.g., how he will lament and weep in the ark, if things come to the worst and God has to destroy them and the world. As is usual in the Sibyllina, the biblical thread is strung with variegated chips of legend and romantic mythology, but it is not so thickly strung as to become invisible. There is a simplicity and directness in this popular poetry on the biblical narrative which is superior to the prosaic paraphrase of Josephus. The Christian section is of less merit, either from a religious or from a literary point of view. It is a florid cento from the NT, with a vehement animus against the Jews. A fair specimen of the authors outlook may be found in the description of Christ, the son of the immortal God, in 332 f.:

He shall fulfil, he shall not destroy, Gods law,

bringing the original pattern, and shall teach all things.

To him shall the priests [Note: Mat 2:11.] bring offerings of gold, myrrh and incense.

But when a voice sounds through the desert,

bidding all mortals loudly

to make straight paths and cast evils from their heart

and be enlightened by baptism in the waters, [Note: ; cf. below (p. 487).] every one,

that being born From above they no more

may swerve from the right in the least-

then mortals shall have a sign suddenly,

when the Fair Stone comes guarded from Egypts land,|| [Note: | Cf. Mat 2:15; 1Pe 2:7 f.]

whereat the people of the Hebrews will stumble,

but the nations will muster under his guidance.

Then follows a note of His miracles similar to that of bk. viii. (see below).

The second book is predominantly eschatological, as might be expected, since the Sibyl now comes to the closing generations of mankind. One of the characteristics of this literature is its stress upon a purpose in history; sin is to be punished by God, amid sore suffering, and the punishment implies not only the overthrow of impious States on earth, but a final judgment of God, to which all leads up. The second book starts with a brief, gloomy description of the woes that vex earth in the tenth generation, when Rome is shattered by a visitation from heaven. Then earth is peaceful and fruitful for the pious, free from the curse of private property and Imperial tyranny. At this point, the Sibyllinist dramatically describes the contest for the virtuous rewards of immortality, over which Christ presides (34 f.)-a section which is further marked by the incorporation of a long moralistic [Note: Note, e.g., the denunciation (111-118) of the love of money, as elsewhere in iii. 235 f., viii. 18 f. Rapacity is one of the cardinal sins with which these Eastern provincials charge the Roman Empire (iii. 350 f., viii. 18 f., 96 f.); the Sibyl reflects the resentment felt by the popular mind at the taxes levied by Rome, as well as the ordinary ethical protest against avarice and luxury. The general ethics are discussed with reference to the Didache by Rendel Harris in The Teaching of the Apostles, London, 1887, p. 40 f., and by A. Dieterich in his Nekyia, Leipzig, 1893, p. 193 f.] passage (56-148) from pseudo-Phocylides. The oracle then returns to the wceful last days, the misfortunes of the Jews, and the Last Judgment. The Christian accretions are probably from various hands, but none of them necessarily implies an early date. Lines 168 f. may be a quotation from the Gospel of the Egyptians (cf. vol. i. p. 495), but what Clement (Strom. iii. 6, 45) cites from the latter is only a parallel to the Sibylline allusion. The reference to the intercession of the Virgin Mary (312) is not so primitive as the remarks of Irenaeus (v. 19), and the earliest parallel to the divine lists of struggle for the prizes of bliss occurs in Tertullians treatise Ad Mart. 3. Whatever may have been the period of the fragments that constitute the nucleus of the book, the Christian touches need not be assigned to a date much, if at all, earlier than the end of the 2nd cent., and they may well be later. No early Father quotes from them. They are marked by a weird, grim power, if we can speak of power in connexion with the Christian Sibyllina at all, either in edification or in literary quality. The apocalyptic element is strong, coloured by tinges familiar (e.g. 165 f. = Mat 24:24 f.) to us from current apocalyptic treatises, but often with an individuality of its own.

It is in this book (15 f.) that we first meet the famous Sibylline doctrine of the ten ages of the world (cf. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics i. 200, and A. Rzachs paper in Wiener Studien, xxxiv. [1912] 114-122), which had been current in the pagan Sibyllina already (cf. Servius on Verg. Eclog. iv. 4). It recurs in iii. 108 f., in a separate form, the tenth generation being the generation of the Titans which is reckoned as the tenth from the Flood (the passage quoted by Tertullian, see above, p. 481). But here and in viii. 199 f. it is eschatological, the tenth generation being the last. In iv. 47-87 the tenth generation seems to mark the downfall of the Persian Empire at the hands of Alexander, and the generations are reckoned from the Flood, whereas in i. 1-198, which appears to be the prelude to ii. 15 f., the generations are reckoned from Adam, the fifth generation being that of the Giants.

One of the most characteristic passages is the eschatological delineation in 238 f.:

When Sabaoth, Adonai, thundering on high

raises the dead, setting a term to their fates,

and seats a himself on the heavenly throne and places the great pillars, [Note: Taking as generic. But this feature is unexampled and unintelligible. Did the Sibyllinist mean the whipping-post of a Roman place of trial?]

then Christ the immortal shall come in a cloud

to the Immortal, with mighty angelic retinue,

seating himself at the right hand of the Great, and judging from the throne

the life of the pious and the ways of the impious,

Moses, the great friend of the Most High, shall also come,

clothed in flesh, and Abraham the great,

Isaac and Jacob, Joshua, Daniel and Elijah,

Habakkuk, Jonah, and those whom the Hebrews slew.

All the Hebrews after Jeremiah who come for judgment before the throne shall he slay,

that they may receive due recompense and punishment

for what each did in this mortal life.

Then shall all pass through the fiery stream,

through the unquenchable fire: the just

shall all be saved, but the impious shall perish to all eternity,

as many as have formerly wrought evil,

committed murder or been accomplices therein,

all liars, thieves, deceivers, foul adulterers,

parasites, intriguers, sowers of slander,

wicked, violent, lawless, and idolatrous persons,

all who have forsaken the great immortal God,

who have turned blasphemers, persecutors of the pious,

destroyers of the faithful, scorners of just men,

all who with crafty and shameless double-face

as presbyters and honoured deacons [Note: Even Christian officials are among the condemned, as in the Dantesque vision of the 4th cent. Apocalypse of Paul (ed. Tischendorf, Leipzig, 1866, p. 34 f.), where the Apostle sees a presbyter, a bishop, and a deacon successively tormented for their ecclesiastical misdeeds.] look on

There is a lacuna in the text at this point, after which the grim list of crimes is continued, with their fitting punishment. In 313 f., the bliss of heaven is portrayed as follows:

But as for those others who cared for justice and good deeds,

for piety and righteous thoughts,

angels shall bear them up through the fiery stream

to light and life without a care,

where is the immortal path of the great God,

where are the three fountains of wine, honey and milk.

There shall earth be alike for all, undivided

by walls and barriers, then of its own accord

it will bear richer fruits, possessions shall be in common

and wealth no monopoly. [Note: A point reiterated by the Sibyllina (e.g. iii. 247. Heaven fashioned the earth to be common to all)-one of several drawn from Stoic ethics.]

No poor shall be there, no rich man, no tyrant,

no slave, neither great nor small any more,

no kings, no rulers, all shall be alike in fellowship.

None shall ever say again. Night has come or Morning,

or Yesterday, none worries over length of days,

over spring, over summer, over winter, over autumn,

over marriage, over death, over buying, over selling,

over sunset, over sunrise: it shall be one long day.

The last words literally run, and He shall make one long day. But, in order to avoid the appearance of describing a selfish bliss, the Sibyllinist proceeds to the following remarkable doctrine:

And another thing will the almighty, immortal God bestow on them: [Note: The denial that the punishment of hell is eternal tallies with Origens doctrine, and an indignant scribe or editor has appended a protest, which has been preserved in some MSS. Obviously a lie, he remarks, for the fire of punishment will never leave the condemned, though personally I could wish it were so, scarred as I am with such sore wounds of sin, that need all the greater Mercy. Origen ought to be ashamed of chattering as though there were any limit to punishment.]

when the pious ask immortal God, he will grant them to save men

from the fierce fire and eternal torment: this also he will do (for them)

He will take the men again from the tireless fire

and for the sake of his own people will transport them

to another life, immortal, undying,

in the Elysian plain, where he has the great waters

of the deep-bosomed lake, perennial Acherusia.

At the thought of this the Sibyl breaks into a pathetic prayer for herself:

Alas, wce is me for that day,

when I am punished for all my ill deeds,

I who cared nought for marriage [Note: The traditional Sibyl is unmarried, though there is one strange exception in the Sibyl whom Pausanias mentions (x. 12); she was called Herophile or Artemis, she sang at Delphi about the rape of Helen and the Trojan war, and she was the wedded wife of Apollo, and his daughter, and his sister. Perhaps here as in vii. 153 (see below, p. 486) she confesses to having sinned sexually instead of marrying. Only, she seems to be married here, unless in the house of my wealthy man means residence in the shrine of Apollo. The two versions of her past life differ slightly.] or sound reason,

but in the house of my wealthy man

shut out the needy, and deliberately

wrought unlawful deeds aforetime! Saviour, do thou save me from my tormentors,

a shameless woman, who has done immodestly.

Lo, I beseech thee, let me cease a little from my song,

O holy giver of manna, king of a great kingdom.

The long third book, on the other hand, is almost entirely a Jewish compilation, with oracles dating from the 2nd and the 1st centuries b.c. Originally it had 1034 verses instead of the extant 829. No book of our collection is so important for the study of this Jewish propaganda in its eschatological aspects, and none presents such difficulties to the literary analyst. It is plain that a Christian has threaded in lines here and there, e.g. 776 (if is read for or – ); it is by no means so plain that longer sections like 46-62 and 63-92 are of Christian origin, although the latter, with its striking description of Beliar (Simon Magus?) who comes from Sebaste (Samaria?) and of the catastrophes at the end of the world, does not have a Jewish ring about it. Apart from the possible exception of these passages, the motley oracles of the book are all pre-Christian; this is almost the sole result which stands out clearly amid the various literary analyses. The fourth book is distinctly Jewish, and is commonly dated c. [Note: . circa, about.] a.d. 80, since the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 (130-136) is regarded as a punishment for the Roman treatment of Judaea , and is to be followed by an Eastern attack on Rome, headed by Nero, from beyond the Euphrates. It is a short, heterogeneous book, and is quoted by Justin and Clement of Alexandria, as well as by Lactantius. Its antipathy (27 ff.) to any visible temple and to material sacrifices has been taken by some critics to mark a type of Judaism different from that of bks. iii and v-either Essenism or some allied though independent phase (cf. Lightfoots Colossians and Philemon, new ed., London, 1879, p. 96 f.); but these allusions may be to pagan cults, and even the stress laid on grace before food (24 f.) does not stamp the oracle as Essenic. The fifth book is larger and stretches further down, though the contents are still predominantly Jewish, and even Egyptian, to judge from the curious reference of approval to the temple of Onias (501-511). It is a medley of denunciations, woes, and predictions, the latest of which are not earlier than Hadrians reign (46 ff.) and possibly [Note: If line 51, which speaks of Hadrians three successors, belongs to the previous oracle (1-50), and is not an interpolation.] as late as that of Marcus Aurelius. But these Jewish oracles of the first two Christian centuries owe their present form to some Christian editor of the latter century. The first Christian to quote from them is Clement of Alexandria. Here and there, but not often, we can detect a Christian patch, as at 256-259:

But then shall a unique Man come from heaven,

who spreads out his hands on the Wood [Note: e. the Cross (see below, on bk. vi.); Ignatius (ad Smyrn. i. 2) had already called Christians the fruit of the Cross.] of rich fruit,

the beat of the Hebrews, who one day shall stay [Note: The meaning is obscure, partly because the reading varies. K, Buresch and Geffcken read for the () of the MSS; either the miracle of Joshua is to be repeated in the last days (cf. Lact. Div. Inst. vii. 26. 2: et statuet deus solem) or Jews is in some way identified with Joshua (owing to the Greek equivalent ; cf. Heb 4:8). Hirsch, however, recalls the Midrash Tanumah on Exo 17:1-8, according to which Moses stopped the sun and moon when he stretched out his bands at the battle with the Amalekites. This would tally with the Sibyllline point of view in viii. 251 (see below).] the sun,

with fair words issuing from pure lips.

Another touch, which possibly is late, is the abrupt (293 ff) prediction of ruin for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which is to be overwhelmed by an earthquake and to sink into the sea, to the bitter grief of the Ephesians.

Substantially, however, these three books are Jewish in texture. At their best, they voice the highest propaganda of Hellenistic Judaism between the 2nd cent. b.c. and the 2nd cent. a.d., when many, in Egypt especially, were conscious of their vocation (cf., e.g., iii, 195, = Rom 2:19, ) to be a source of light and leading to the Gentiles. These primitive Sibyllina of Judaism are neither cosmopolitan nor proselytizing; this is one of their distinctive features. They are national and nomistic, as Krauss observes, in so far as they are Jewish. Even the Messianic time is inconceivable without the Temple, sacrificial worship, and the Law. Despite this, the pagan Greeks are nowhere urged to observe the Law; they are asked merely to lead moral lives and to recognize the one God. Although the Sibyl addresses all peoples, the Syrians, Britons, Gauls, and the nations of the Isles, she especially exhorts the people of Hellas, knowing that it will be well with all the human race if this people with its grand culture will combine its own virtues with the pure religion of Judaism (Jewish Encyclopedia xi. 320b). The latter conviction underlay the Hellenistic propaganda. It was Greece which had been primarily responsible for the development of idolatry in the great Roman world, and Greece must regain her lost monotheism if the mass of men were to abandon polytheism and return to the original worship of the one God. The conversion of Greece (cf. iii. 545 ff.) was the hope of these Sibyllinists. Hence the aptness of their appeal through the stammering, inspired lips of a Sibyl who spoke from the far mists of pre-Homeric antiquity. The appeal, it must be remembered, was not to the intellectuals. The Sibyllina were popular literature, not esoteric essays. They were couched in the language of impressive, popular address, midway between the hymn and the apocalypse, [Note: Friedlnder exaggerates the significance of the Sibyllina for apocalyptic prophecy, but there was a distinct affinity between both forms of Jewish propaganda (Die religisen Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu, Berlin, 1905, p. 289 f.).] and like the latter aimed their shafts at the common heart of men. Naturally, the shafts were winged with threats as well as with promises and argument. And denunciations of idolatry and polytheism as naturally led to eschatological predictions. If the average apocalypse could be called a tract for bad times, the Sibylline oracle was usually a tract for bad people, for nations who had deliberately devoted themselves to idolatry and vice, or outraged the Jewish people. The last words of bk. v are: the heaven remained starless. And that is characteristic of the oracles. These Sibyllinists wrote on the sound principle that some people really need not argument but suffering, if they are ever to be brought to their senses. A starless sky hangs over them. In the Jewish Sibyllina (cf. P. Volz, Jdische Eschatologie, Tbingen, 1903, pp. 46-50, etc.) particularly, though by no means exclusively, impatient threats of doom abound; sometimes it is final, though sometimes it is intended to act as a salutary historical reminder of the pains and penalties which are incurred by all who defy the laws of Israels God. [Note: g. in v. 276 f., and especially in iv. 152 f., when impiety, bloodshed, and vice are rampant, men know that God is no longer gentle and gracious, but gnashing his teeth in anger and destroying the whole race of men together with a huge conflagration. O wretched morals, do not drive God to all sorts of wrath, but give up swords, shrieks, murder, and violence, wash your whole body in ever-running streams, stretch your hands to heaven, ask pardon for your past deeds; God will grant repentance.] The Sibyl will reason with Hellas, e.g., but she will also shower threats of calamity on her. Her oracles are charged with lightning as well as with light. It is this preoccupation with a moralistic view of history which repeatedly tends to make the interest of the Sibyllina eschatological even when they are more hopeful about the heathen; for in contrast to the misery of pagans the Messianic bliss of Israel is depicted, partly to encourage the disconsolate Jews of the period, but partly also to act as a tempting promise to outsiders (e.g. v. 492 f.). It is to the God who can bestow such happiness, not to vain idols, that worship ought to be paid. Thus, in iii. 624 f., after depicting the prosperity of Israel on the new earth-i.e. the new order of things under the later Maccabees-the oracle proceeds to bid the deceitful man turn and make intercession to God, offering him sacrifices and honouring him with good behaviour: it may be that the immortal God will have mercy on thee. But in most cases the oracles are oppressed by the sense that things have gone too far. Their environment was dark. What the Sibyl generally has in mind, it must be repeated, is not so much the philosophers of Hellas as the practical propaganda which followed in the wake of the Seleucid kings (e.g. iii. 732 f.), with its contemptuous indifference to all that a Jew valued in monotheism and even in morals. This is one of the main threads running through the woof of these three Jewish books of Sibyllina, the desire to warn at any rate and win if possible contemporary Hellenism. As the latter hope waned, the Sibyls testimony hardened into denunciation and doom.

In the sixth book we are back on Christian ground, more thoroughly Christian than any we have yet crossed. At the same time, there is not a single allusion to the Sibyl. The book is simply a short hymn, which has been taken to represent a theology akin to some of the uncanonical gospels and to have originated in more or less heretical circles of the 2nd cent. Church. Heretical, in this connexion, is a question-begging epithet, however, as Harnack points out; eccentric would suit the contents better. The piece need not be earlier than the 3rd cent., though 2nd cent. parallels are not awanting. The only help in determining its relative date is furnished by the fact that it is quoted by Lactantius, but there are no historical references to enable us to say how much earlier than the beginning of the 4th cent. its composition is to be placed. It is the briefest of the extant Sibylline books, and may therefore be translated in full. The present writer appends a fairly literal version, in order to bring out the peculiar theology of the piece:

I hail from the heart the Immortals great Son, renowned in song.

who was granted the throne to possess, by the Father most High,

ere yet he was born; whereupon in the flesh granted him

he appeared and bathed in the streams of the river of Jordan

that moves with grey tread on as it rolls its waters.

Avoiding the fire, [Note: The tradition which appears in some of the uncanonical gospels (see vol. i. p. 494).] he first shall behold the sweet Spirit

of God, borne on the white shining wings of the Dove.

A Blossom pure shall bloom, and spring shall gush;

to men shall he show the Ways, shall show the paths of heaven,

and give to all instruction in tales of wisdom.

He shall come for judgment and smite the disobedient People,

extolling the praiseworthy race of the Father in heaven.

He shall tread on the waves, shall free mankind from diseases,

shall cause the dead to arise, shall banish many a sorrow:

from a single wallet [Note: Mat 14:19. Lactantius seems to have read , but the MSS reading (root) would connect with the following line and yield a good, though slightly different, sense.] shall bread in abundance issue for men,

when Davids house puts forth its Plant; and in his hand

the whole world lies, the earth, the sky, the sea.

He shall flash upon the earth, as when at his first appearance

they two saw him, [Note: Adam and Eve.] who had been born each from the side of the other.

And this shall be when earth rejoices in hope of the Child.

But for thee alone, O land of Sodom, [Note: Rev 11:8.] evil woes are in store;

for thou, thou didst not know thy God, insensate one,

when he came to be seen of men; nay, with thorns for a crown

thou crownedst him, and for his drink despitefully

didst mix the dreadful gall-hence come thine evil woes.

O cross, [Note: One of the first allusions to the cult of the Cross, in its legendary development (cf. ERE iv. 328). Sozomen remembers to quote this line in his 5th cent. history (ii. 1) when telling the romantic story of how Queen Helena found the genuine Cross of Jesus at Jerusalem. He protests against any sceptical surprise, on the ground that even among the Greeks this Sibylline view was admitted: O most blessed wood, on which God was stretched out. Our most ardent opponents would not deny this, so that the wood of the Cross and the reverence paid to at are clearly proved to have been foreshadowed.] most blessed wood, on which God was stretched out,

earth shall no longer hold thee, thou shalt see heaven thy home,

when Gods bright Light flashes forth afresh.

The text of bk. vii is broken at several places, and the contents are miscellaneous, but the bulk seems to be of Jewish Christian origin; there are Gnostic touches (e.g. in 139 ff.), which indicate a soil in the 2nd or 3rd cent. similar to that of bk. vi. The book, however, is such a conglomerate of fragments that it defies any general estimate. A brief wce on Rhodes, Delos, Cyprus, and Sicily is abruptly followed by a reference to Noah, and a prediction of the final deluge, as follows (9-23): [Note: 9-13 are almost verbally equivalent to i. 193-196.]

The earth shall float, the hills shall float, the very air (heaven) shall float,

all things shall be water, and by water shall all things be destroyed;

the winds shall be stayed, and a second age shall begin.

O Phrygia, thou shalt first emerge from the top of the water,

thou first shalt impiously deny thy God,

delighting thyself in idols dumb, in idols that shall be thy ruin,

O wretched one, when many years have run their course.

The luckless Ethiopians, who suffer piteous pangs,

shall be struck down by the sword, as they stoop and bend.

Fair Egypt, ever blessed with corn,

watered by the seven flowing streams of the Nile,

shall be ruined by strife and faction; whereupon, in despair,

men shall drive out Apis-no god for men!

Wce to thee, Laodicea, [Note: Laodicea is frequently doomed in the Sibyllina-usually to destruction by an earthquake (e.g. iii. 471-472, iv. 107-108, v. 290-291, xii. 280-281), however.] who never hast God beheld,

thou shalt be beguiled, thou proud one; the Lycus will flood thee over.

The following fragments are Messianic (24 f.), historical denunciations [Note: The habit of threatening and denouncing grew as the Sibyllina went on. The severe tone had been characteristic of the pagan Sibyl, and as Bouch-Leclercq, observes (op. cit., p. 202), it sounded still more loudly in the Jewish oracles. La Sibylle ne sait gure menacer sans maudire.] (40 f.), and woes on Troy, Colophon, Corinth, and Tyre, as well as on CCEle-Syria (64 f.) for its indifference to the Logos-Messiah (line 84 echoing the thought of the fire at Christs baptism, in vi. 6). Then comes a group of oracles, apparently taken from some older collection, against Sardinia, Celtiberia, Mygdonia, Rome, Syria, and Thebes (96-117). The terrors which precede the Messianic Age are described (118-149), with a brief picture of the new order of things on lines familiar to us from apocalyptic traditions preserved in Papias, and Irenaeus, and elsewhere. Lactantius quotes (Div. Inst. vii. 16, 13) from this fragment (123). It may be conjectured with some certainty that here as elsewhere the short, pithy oracles of doom and warning addressed to places in which neither a Jewish nor a Christian Sibyllinist would feel any direct interest originally belonged to some collection of pagan prophecies. Often they stand in an extremely loose connexion with each other, or with their general context. We may suppose that they were retained, partly to lend vraisemblance to the new composition, partly for the sake of some local importance which is lost to us.|| [Note: | Zosimus, the Greek historian of the 5th cent., preserves a fragment or 37 lines (ii. 5) which give directions for the proper celebration of the ludi seculares. This was a pagan oracle which Christians would naturally ignore, and it is therefore absent from our collection. It is possibly the sort of Sibyllini versus mentioned by Horace in his Carmen Seculare (pt. iv. line 5).]

The close of the book is singular (150 f.), for, after describing the bliss of men upon the new earth, the Sibyl utters an apologia and plea for herself as a pagan, which goes beyond the similar cry in bk. ii. (see above, p. 484). She confesses that she has sinned both wilfully and carelessly, and has despised marriage (i.e. as the context here seems to imply, indulged in sexual vice). For all this, she is to die, and barn in hell-fire, when men on earth have stoned and buried her. But apparently-for the text is mangled and dim-she hopes for deliverance, when God instructs her and raises her to life in heaven. We have here the Christian Sibyllinist conscious of the drawbacks attaching to his pagan mouthpiece, and endeavouring to adjust her character to the new setting. It is not enough to put predictions and statements of Christian doctrine in the mouth of a pagan Sibyl of the far past; she must be made to repent of her errors and be Christianized at the end.

The miscellaneous contents of bk. viii., from which Lactantius has quoted largely, are distinguished by an unusual antipathy to the tyranny and avarice [Note: As in iv. 145 f. (to Asia there shall come the great wealth which Rome once stole and placed in her rich treasure; twice as much, aye and more, shall she restore to Asia) and even in iii. 350 f. (For all the money received by Rome from tributary Asia, Asia shall receive three times as much from Rome, and pay back to her the horrid insolence). We may overhear the same note in Commodians Carmen Apologeticum, 889 f. (tollatur imperium, quod fuit inique repletum, quod per tributa mala diu macerabat omnes).] of the Roman Empire. The ordinary view is that 1-216 are in the main Jewish, the rest Christian. A general blend of woes, Messianic prophecies, incongruous separate oracles, and historical allusions characterizes the former. The denunciation of Rome in 1-138 and the prediction of her downfall must be dated not earlier than the burial of Hadrian (52-64) in a.d. 139. The bitterness of the allusions to Hadrian, which contrasts so remarkably with the tone of bks. v and xii. to that Emperor, points to a Jew rather than to a Christian as the author of the piece; and if the piece is homogeneous, in spite of some lacunae in the extant text, it must have originally been the work of a provincial [Note: Yet the (Cumaean?) Sibyl seems to be prophesying in Rome ( , 3).] Jew, exasperated by Hadrians suppression of the Palestinian rebellion, and by the Judaicus fiscus, as that unpopular tax was levied and collected. Lines 139-216 are heterogeneous, partly taken from earlier books (e.g. 169 f. from iii. 49 f.), but never betraying any decisive trace of Christian authorship. [Note: The end of Rome is predicted (189 f.) for a.d. 195, in connexion with the return of Nero from the East.]

The case is altered when we pass from line 216 to 217; then and thenceforth we are on Christian soil of the 3rd century. Indeed four Manuscripts print 217-500 as part of a ninth book; they have no relation to the fragments of the preceding oracle, and it is owing to a blunder of the first editor, in all likelihood, or of some scribe, that these two disparate sections have been yoked together. [Note: Alexandre assigned viii. 217 f. and the introductory Theophilus fragments to a Christian who wrote in the first quarter of the 2nd century.] The outstanding feature of this part of the book is the famous opening acrostic on the name of , which, in a Latin translation, is actually cited by Augustine (in the Civ. Dei, xviii, 23) as a genuine prophecy of Christ which had fallen from the lips of the Erythraean Sibyl. In Constantines Orat. ad sanctorum ccetum (18) the acrostic is quoted with the addition|| [Note: | The addition is superfluous when a double acrostic is made out of the initial letters of each word, i.e. , Fish, the favourite early Christian symbol.] of , and this is the form in the Sibylline oracles. It is next to impossible to reproduce, without extreme awkwardness, in a translation the artificial structure of the lines, but the following version is an attempt to preserve the acrostic feature which is the outstanding characteristic of the Greek original. The present writer has rhymed the translation, in order to make it less prosaic:

Judgment is come, the earth shall sweat in fear;

Eternal, the King leaves the heavenly sphere,

Sentence to pass on all the world of men.

On God the just and unjust shall look then,

Uplifted mid his saints, when time is done;

Souls, mortal souls, he judges from his throne,

Changing to dry land and to thorns the wide

Round earth, till men their idols [Note: Literally their idols and all their wealth.] fling aside.

Earth, sky and sea the flame shall burn, and dash

Into the gates of Hell with shattering crash;

Saints in the flesh shall shine in liberty,

The lawless fire devours eternally.

Of secret deeds the tale shall then be told,

Since God the hearts dim corners shall unfold.

Then shall all wail and gnash their teeth, at strange

Eclipse of sun, dropping of stars, and change

Of heaven, the moonlight lost, while here below

Up rise the valleys, down the mountains go;

Under the sky no lofty peak shall soar

Inhuman, hill and plain shall be no more,

Or sea to fare upon; the scorched land,

Springs, rippling rivers, perish by the brand.

Sounding from heaven, the trumpet peals a blast

Of wrath and wce upon the evil cast,

The earth in opened and hells pit laid bare.

Each and all stand before Gods royal chair.

Rivers of fiery sulphur [Note: A cataract of fire and brimstone pours through the Sibyllina from iii. 54 f. onwards (cf. ERE v. 390).] flood the air.

Sign of all this, a vivid seal, shall be

The cross among the faithful joyfully,

A hindrance to the world, but life and light

Unending [Note: Literally, enlightening of the elect with water from twelve springs (i.e. the twelve apostles?). Orthodox baptism (cf. above, p. 483).] to elect souls washed aright;

Rod or the shepherd, shall it rule in iron might.

Our God is shown in the acrostic thus,

Saviour, immortal King, who died for us.

This acrostic was composed partly to lend an air of authenticity to the Christian Sibyllina. The pagan tradition [Note: Hal. iv. 62 quotes Varro to this effect.] was that the Sybil had spoken her oracle in acrostic form. When sceptics doubled the genuineness of the Christian oracles, it was useful to be able to point to a specimen of the acrostic which told in favour of Christian doctrine. But its inherent popularity led to translations into Latin, even before Augustines day.

The remainder of the oracle is a chaos of queer fragments. The acrostic is immediately followed by the remark that the Crucified Christ was typified by the outstretched arms of Moses at the victory over Amalek (251 f.), an idea which had been propounded by the author of Barnabas (xii. 2) and by Justin Martyr (Dial. 90). The advent of Christ (256 f.) shades off into a comparison between the creation and the end, but in 270 ff. the life and Passion of Christ are described afresh. One of the romantic touches in the picture of the Risen Lord is the symbolism of the four wounds in His hands and feet (318 f.), which He shows to the faithful (cf. Joh 20:20 f.); these are explained to mean the four quarters of the earth-north, south, east, and west having to bear witness against the cruelty of man. The next fragment depicts the entry of Christ into Jerusalem (323 ff.). Then a break occurs, ushering in a dramatic sketch of the Last Day, the burning of the world, and the horrible woes of men (337-358). Through the lips of the Sibyl (359 ff.) God now teaches His true nature, the vanity of idols, and the superfluousness of sacrifice (390), the two ways set before men (399 f.), and the pains and rewards which they may expect. This long homiletic section is almost unique in the Christian Sibyllina. It ends abruptly, and the next paragraph (429 f.) treats of the Divine providence and mans relation to his Creator and Judge. The text is badly preserved, but we can trace a form of Logos theology behind the doctrine. In 456 f., the oracle becomes clearer; the Virgin-birth at Bethlehem is described. Suddenly, however, the scene changes, and the closing verses (480 ff.) are a moralistic homily to Christians upon humility, love to God and man, reverence, worship, and the like-wholesome doctrine, but quite out of keeping with any Sibylline setting. The preacher has overpowered the pcet, and the passion for edifying has proved too strong for the writers sense of dramatic fitness.

The passage on Christs advent (256 f.) deserves to be quoted. It was a favourite of Lactantius:

For he shall not enter the world [Note: Mendelssohn happily conjectures for the irrelevant of the MSS, here and in 269.] in glory, but as a mortal man,

pitiable, without honour and comeliness, to give hope to the pitiable,

to give comeliness to mortal flesh and heavenly faith to the unbelieving,

to fashion man who in the beginning had been formed by Gods holy hands,

but whom the serpent had craftily seduced to the doom of death,

to gain the knowledge of good and evil,

till he deserted God and worshipped mortal beings.

The Almighty at the beginning took him as his counsellor,

saying, Let us both, my son, mould mortal race after our likeness:

I shall devote my hands, and thou the Word, to our form,

that together we may make the product.

Mindful, then, of this design he shall enter the world,

bringing the original pattern into the holy virgin,

baptizing with water by the hands of presbyters,

doing all things by his Word, healing every disease.

With his word he shall check the winds, smooth the raging sea,

walking on it with the feet of peace and in faith.

It is from this eighth book (337 f.), as Augustine [Note: According to Augustine, the Sibyl and Job are the two pre-Christian personalities who can be reckoned as classical examples of membership in Gods City (xviii. 23 and 47).] used it to show that the Sibyl was a pre-Christian witness to the truth of Christian prophecy, that the famous mediaeval hymn drew its inspiration for the lines:

Dies irae, dies illa,

Soluet saeclum in fauilla,

Teste Dauid cum Sibylla.

The final destruction of the world by fire is proved not only by the psalter but by the Sibylline oracles; [Note: The earlier Sibylline proofs (e.g. in iv. 193 f.) were in the mind of Justin when he wrote (Apol. i. 20) that the Sibyl and Hystaspes certify that corruptible things are to be dissolved by fire (cf. Mayors note on, 2Pe 3:7).] they were enlisted in the service of Christian eschatology. The God who had spoken of this crisis by David had spoken of it also by this pagan prophetess. Another echo of the oracle is to be heard in the 5th (6th?) cent. composition, QuCEstiones et responsa ad orthodoxos (74 if the end of the present order of things is the judgment of the impious by fire, as the scriptures of prophets and apostles declare, as well as those of the Sibyl), which was erroneously attributed to Justin Martyr. We can understand, from this widespread feeling in a later age, how Michael Angelo neither felt nor excited any sense of incongruity in painting Sibyls along with OT prophets on the roof of the Sixtine Chapel. Giotto had already done this in the Campanile at Florence. Here as elsewhere art naively expressed the popular theology of the age.

The following books are political rather than religious; this distinguishes them from most of the other Sibylline oracles, whether Jewish or Christian, but it is a return to the primitive function and temper of the classical Sibyl. The eleventh book is a rambling, fanciful series of oracles, in which the Sibyl, as in bk. v., is concerned mainly with the fortunes of Egypt down to the period of Cleopatra; [Note: The monstrous regiment of women is for the Sibyllines an invariable prelude of disaster; the idea is historically applied to Berenice III. in 81 b.c. (xi. 245 f.), and then to Cleopatra (cf. viii. 199, iii. 75 f.). Bousset (Antichrist Legend, London, 1896, p. 99 f.) sees behind this a conception of the marine anti-divine monster as feminine.] Egypts subjugation by the Romans is Gods punishment for her treatment of Israel (307 ff.). She starts from the Flood and the Tower of Babel, surveys the ancient monarchies, and ends, as she begins, with Egypt. The stand-point is Jewish, but this does not necessarily imply that the author was a Jew, although it must be admitted that there are no distinctively Christian touches in the oracles. They are practically devoid of religious interest. The Sibyl takes occasion to repeat (163 f.; see bk. iii. 419-426) [Note: In a private communication, Professor Walter Scott points out that these passages from bks. iii and xi probably imply that this author knew the pagan oracles of the Trojan War to which Pausanias alludes (see above, p. 478). The complaint of the Sibyl against Homer belonged to pagan tradition; it, was not invented by Jews or Christians. Varro (as reported by Lactantius, Div. Inst. i. 6. 9) tells that the Erythraean Sibyl Graiis llium petentibus vaticinatam et perituram esse Troiam et Homerum mendacia scripturum.] her charge against Homer, after telling the fate of Troy:

And again there shall be a wise old man of song,

whom all dub wisest among men.

Plainly shall he get down things quite unspeakable,

having gained possession of my words, my measures, and my verses;

be first shall unfold my books

and then hide them, and show them to men no more.

The pre-Homeric Sibyl thus claims to have furnished Homer with the materials for his epic, which he took over without acknowledgment and then suppressed. This is intended, of course, to account for two features in the Sibylline oracles, the fact of their late publication and the hexameter metre. The former fact was explained on the same lines as the late publication of apocalypses which professed to have been written by men of the far past; they remained unknown for long, because they had been hidden purposely either by the author or by others, for various reasons. The Sibyllinist does not hesitate to blacken Homers character, in order to establish the good faith of the Sibyl herself. Otherwise, the only feature of interest in the book is the repeated use made of the third book. The very asseveration of her veracity as an interpreter of the Divine counsel, with which she closes as she opens the oracle, echoes the opening lines of the third book. Only, she feels [Note: This Cassandra-like touch goes back to the pagan tradition.] that her predictions are to be ridiculed and her warnings ignored (314 f.). So she will retire [Note: Sibyls were not always stationary. Some would wander abroad, like the Babylonian (iii. 809 f.) or the Erythraean. This reflects either a primitive tradition that the Sibyls roamed on their mission, to the discerning on earth or an aetiological explanation of the widespread traces or Sibylline oracles.] to the shrine of Apollo, where she is regarded as a true, ecstatic prophetess. The time will come when the hearers of this present oracle will have to admit that she was no deceiver.

The data for calculating the date of the piece are exceptionally few and vague. There is an apparent reference to the extent of the Roman Empire in lines 160-161; but the reading varies, and, while one critic deduces from the language [Note: The Sibyls trick of punning continues, e.g., in 236 ( ). She had caught it from the pagan oracles of her tribe, e.g. the famous (iii. 363-364)

, ,

.

But the OT instances paved the way for its usage among Hellenistic Judaists.] that the author wrote between a.d. 115 and 118, another is equally confident that the Sibyllinist must have survived the overthrow of the Parthian kingdom in a.d. 226. All that is certain is that the terminus a quo for the composition of the main part of the book is the overthrow of Cleopatra by the Romans.

Since Lightfoot wrote (Apostolic Fathers, pt. ii.2 [London, 1889]: Ignatius and Polycarp, vol. i. p. 542f.), it has been customary to accept bks. xi-xiv as a continuous prophecy, which summarizes the history of the world from the Flood down to the end of the 3rd cent. a.d. at the earliest. But even so, it is not a unity. The contents have been increased and altered from time to time by successive hands, and data of style and language place bks. xii. and xiii. by themselves as superior to the other two. Unfortunately, even in the case of the latter, the text is extremely corrupt, and the historical allusions [Note: It is almost refreshing to come across (in xii. 196 f.) a reference to the legend of the thundering legion, in the survey of the campaigns of Marcus Aurelius. The divine miracle is attributed to the pious deserts of the Emperor.] are often ambiguous.

While the eleventh book kept the fortunes of the Egyptian Empire in the foreground, the twelfth book chronicles the wceful time of the sons of Latium (like v. 1-11, from which xii. 1-11 is verbally taken]. Our Sibyl sketches rapidly and incoherently the course of the Roman Empire, with repeated indifference to the facts of history. The date of the book is fixed by the death of Alexander Severus, with which the oracles end. It must have been written during the first half of the 3rd century. Otherwise there is little definite information about the author. Geffcken, who has devoted special attention to this book, finds Christian additions in 28-34 (the prophecy of Christs birth) and 232, which have a Jewish source, written not so much by an ardent Jew [Note: The favourable opinion of Hadrian (163-176) tells against this. How could any Jew, writing after Bar Cochbas revolt, describe the Emperor thus? (The similar praise in v. 46 f. was written originally before that, since line 51, which implies a later period, must be an interpolated addition to the oracle.) Yet, even so, it is difficult to understand how either a Jew or a Christian of any definite belief could commend the Emperors interest in the pagan mysteries (169-170). A similar difficulty is raised by the curiously negative description of the dead in viii. 107 f.; but the mood of Ecclesiastes cannot be supposed to have died out among thinkers of Jewish birth.] as by one who was above all things an Eastern provincial, with ill-concealed admiration for the Imperial system. [Note: Even in the Christian passage (33-34), it is pointed out that the strength of Rome in to increase with him (i.e. Christ). The author will not hear of the charge that his religion was either a foe or a source of weakness to the Empire.] But it is a dull book. The Sibyl at the close begs for relief from the strain of rhapsody, on the ground that her soul within is weary of the divine measures, prophesying of royal reigns. The reader is also weary, long before the Sibyl. Short chronicles of long historical periods are apt to be dull, even in prose. When they are written in verse by a third-rate pcet who covers three centuries in less than three hundred lines, they are even less relevant to poetry and religion than to history.

The thirteenth book covers an exceptionally short period, only a quarter of a century, from a.d. 241 to 265. It is the wail of a Christian who has a passionate abhorrence of the persecuting Emperor, Decius, [Note: That is, if Wilamowitz is right in his attractive conjecture (87).] and a brooding sense of pity for the calamities of the Empire. The book illustrates what Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, i.4 [Loudon, 1906]) describes as a period which was one uninterrupted series of contusion and calamity, and one of the few redeeming points, in the mind of the Sibyllinist, seems to be the appearance of Odenathus (147 f.), the powerful senator of Palmyra, whose services in the field compelled the thanks and recognition of the Romans. Otherwise, the survey of the Sibyl embraces little except disgrace and defeat for the Empire. For once, the woes are not open to the suspicion of professional colouring. The historian is obliged to write that during that calamitous period, every instant of time was marked, every province of the Roman world was afflicted, by barbarous invaders and military tyrants, and the ruined empire seemed to approach the last and fatal moment of its dissolution (p. 237), The Sibyllinist reflects this period. If the lights are low in his oracle, it is because they were burning low when it was written. [Note: In 46-49 the Sibyl predicts that Alexandria will supply Rome with corn for as many years as her name stands for (i.e. Rom = 948). Professor Scott (see Literature below) points out a remarkable coincidence in connexion with this. Chosrces the Persian leader conquered in Egypt in a.d. 617. Now 948 years reckoned back from this date brings us to 332 b.c., the year in which Alexandria was founded. If this was in the Sibyllinists mind, he must have written this fragment after 617 (Scott thinks he was the man who also wrote xiv. 284 f., which describes the conquest of Egypt by the Persians), and the fragment was inserted in bk. viii at this point, because in the preceding lines (38-45) it is prophesied that, so long as Alexandria exported corn to Rome, the Persians never would conquer that city. The original Sibyllinist of the 7th cent., of course, expected, on the strength of this prophecy, that the Persians would succeed in conquering Rome.]

The book is short and heterogeneous. The Sibyl is moved (1-6) to narrate the tumultuous wars of the East, in which Rome was involved (8 f.). Suddenly she interpolates (64-73) a stern word to Bostra, which echoes the oracle in iii. 57 f.; the Arabian capital is denounced especially on the score of its passion for astrological pursuits. Other prophecies follow, against Alexandria and Cappadocia particularly, but the Sibyl presently comes back to the disastrous fortunes of Rome (103 f.) and her downfall at the hands of the Easterns; it will be a time when the living will envy the dead, when they say death is good, yet death will fly from them (118-119; cf. Rev 9:6). Then we hear of the dismal plight of Syria (119 f.), and a series of woes on various Eastern cities and provinces follows. Persia and Rome are the protagonists. So much is plain amid the symbolic expressions and the grandiloquent language of the oracle, but the habit of describing kings and rulers as wild beasts or of referring to them by a numerical equivalent for the first letter of their names [Note: An even more exasperating trick is to hint at the first letter(s), by way or assurance. E.g. the Sibyllinist in xi. 23-24, wishing to describe Pharaoh, reminds the reader of Phasgana!] does not promote lucidity, and even when we know the period which is under review it is far from easy to make sense of several details in the Sibyls predictions. Obscurity may be impressive in pseudo-oracular literature, but the impression made is slight. The leading interest of the books oracles is for students of Roman history at this dark period in the Empires course; the book has no religious significance, and there is nothing in its paragraphs which is worth quoting.

It is a question, says Geffcken, whether bk. xi or bk. xiv is the worst of the Sibylline oracles. The latter is at any rate later, written by a Jew who probably lived in Egypt. It opens with a lament and warning on the passion for power and tyranny (1-11), and then passes into an enigmatic, confused series of Eastern chronicles, under the disguise of prophecy, of Roman generals and Emperors who are hardly to be identified, closing (280-283) with a prediction that the race of Latin Emperors is to be replaced by a permanent (; cf. Heb 12:27) generation whose reign is the reign of God. The rest of the book is an oracle on Egypt (284-361), which is almost unintelligible. It is not possible here to do more than call attention to two attempts to bring order out of chaos in this conglomerate of oracles. The first is by A. Wirth (Wiener Studien, xiv. 35 f.), who ingeniously traces the Roman Emperors from Caesar to the close of the 3rd century. One of the chief difficulties in identifying them is that the Sibyllinist as usual never names them: he gives each a number, which is intended to mark the initial letter of his name, each letter of the Greek alphabet being valued numerically as on the well-known principles of the cryptic Gematria which apocalyptic had found so useful. [Note: This goes back to the Sibyllinist of bk. v., where (12 f.) Augustus is the man who has the first of letters (A), Nero the man whose initial letter in fifty (N = 50), and so forth.] Thus, according to Wirth, the man of eighty (in 227) is Probus. Wirth rightly sees that the book cannot be earlier than the 3rd cent. a.d., but this hypothesis requires several data to be forced, and it involves some fanciful reconstruction alike of the text and of the history. Ewald, long ago, had felt that the oracle reflected a much later period, in the 7th cent., and this position has been worked out afresh by W. Scott in an elaborate, ingenious series of papers in The Classical Quarterly, ix. [1915] 144-166, 207-228. He attempts skilfully to illustrate the details of the oracle from the struggle between Rome and Persia for Egypt during the first half of the 7th century. According to this interpretation, the Sibyl sympathizes strongly with the opponents of Rome; the two campaigns of the Persians in a.d. 614-617 and of the Arabs in 639-641, especially the latter, lie behind the Egyptian oracle of this book, which regards the Roman re-occupation between the two conquests from the East as an unwelcome and oppressive epoch. Every defeat of the Romans, in the struggle that swayed over the possession of Alexandria, is hailed as Divine vengeance on the Empire for what the Jews of Egypt had suffered. This interpretation [Note: The difficulty raised by the abrupt allusion in 312 to an army of Sicilians is solved, according to Scott, by reading for , and assuming that Heraclius started his expedition against Egypt in 626-627 from Cilicia, where he had won a footing in 625. Wirth prefers to think of the slavewars in Sicily towards the end of the reign of Gallienus, and Alexandre conjectured .] resets Ewalds general view in the light of recent research upon the Arab conquest of Egypt, and, so far as sense can be made out of an oracle which is often little better than gibberish, it clears up more obscurities than the rival theories, which do not go further down than the 3rd or 4th century. On this hypothesis, of course, the fourteenth book must have been added to the collection after the prologue was written. This is not improbable, in the nature of the case, and it is not even out of keeping with the extant condition of the text, for the fourteenth book ends abruptly, whereas the thirteenth closes with the refrain of the eleventh, the Sibyl pleading exhaustion and begging for a cessation of her poetic and prophetic rhapsody.

Our gratitude to the unknown Byzantine Christian who put the Sibyllina together in this collection is tempered by the impression of carelessness, ignorance, and caprice which mark his editorial efforts. It is true that he did his work for the purpose of edifying pious Christians, and not for the benefit of critical students. It is also true that the roughnesses and obscurities of the text may be partly set down to later scribes. But it was the editor who must have cut up oracles ruthlessly in order to make them fit; he must have omitted sections and thus broken the continuity of many passages, and evidently he knew little or nothing about the origin and sense of several of the oracles which be collected. The result is chaos frequently. The materials are often obscure in themselves, and their setting rarely makes them more intelligible. Oracles lie side by side which differ utterly in aim and date. Fragments from various centuries are scattered over the entire collection, and even the so-called books are hardly ever homogeneous. At the same time, under this incongruity and confusion of the Sibyllina there is a certain unity not only of form but of spirit. (a) The formal unity is more than the adherence to the hexameter. As Rzachs appendix to his edition of the Sibyllina (pp. 240-314) shows, every Sibyllinist made a more or less serious attempt to echo Homer. The Homeric phrases and tags are not confined to the earliest books. They appear in oracles from the 3rd and 6th Christian centuries. To some extent, they are probably indirect, but the use of Homeric phraseology as well as metre was evidently a convention. [Note: It was an instance of what Rendel Harris (The Homeric Centones, p. 3) calls the multiform witchcraft of Homer over the human race. He shows (p. 13 f.) how the Sibyllina took Homer more seriously than the Centones.] The history of literature shows that true poetry need not be stifled by the conventional forms of its age; but whenever the genuine breath of inspiration begins to ebb conventions are borne less lightly, and it is only in one or two books of the Sibyllina that the Homeric conventions are almost forgotten by the reader in the sheer interest of the oracles. It should be recollected, however, that their interest would be greater for their original public, just because they were circulated as separate pieces. A modern reader has the collected mass before him, and the juxtaposition of good, poor, and indifferent prevents him from appreciating the occasional flashes of genuine pathos and stern power which lighten up the surrounding mists.

(b) To a certain extent, also, there is a general point of view, which survives in spite of the different historical and religious situations. The cosmology is fairly uniform in outline if not in details, and even the theology, apart from the definitely Christian touches, [Note: Which are moulded, as a rule, on a type of their own.] has a character of its own. This is particularly true of the eschatology, for, although one oracle will be more Messianic (in the personal sense of the term) than another, although the Jewish sections tend to view the consummation as a prolonged reign of the holy nation on earth, while the Christian Sibyllinists lay more stress on the catastrophe of the Last Judgment, yet these and other variations do not obliterate the large common features which the Sibyllina shared with apocalyptic-calculations about the near end, the conditions of the Judgment, the expectation of Neros return, and so forth. Here, as in the theology, there must have been a tradition, partly akin to Orphism and Stoicism, to which every Sibylinist felt bound to conform in the main, however well-marked his idiosyncrasies might be. It is the same in the political aspect. One oracle will favour Hadrian, for example, more than another, but it is impossible as a rule to mistake the unswerving antipathy to Rome in the later Sibyllina, where it succeeds to the rle of Syria in the earlier. Jew and Christian were generally at one on this point, when they composed Sibyllina. Their reasons might vary, and there might be differences in the degree of their bitterness, but the Roman Empire stood out as the last enemy to be conquered by, or rather for, the just. The rivalry of East and West, which characterized ancient history, was to be decided in favour of the East. This again was a feature which the Sibyllina shared with their allied literary product, the apocalypses. Upon the whole, we may contend that, while those who endeavour to identify the historical situations of the various Sibylline oracles are right in feeling that the ars nesciendi forms an unusually important part of the investigators equipment, nevertheless, standing back from the details, we are able to gain a fairly broad and accurate impression of their general spirit and characteristics. [Note: The Swedish scholar, E. Fehr, has published an excellent monograph on these characteristics (Studia in Oracula Sibyllina, Upsala, 1893).]

The amazing developments of the Sibylline myth in Byzantine and mediaeval literature do not concern us here, as they were practically independent of our Sibylline collection and subsequent to it. It was the 9th cent. Byzantine chronicler, Georgios Monachos (Hamartolos), for example, who apparently started the idea that the biblical queen of Sheba could be converted into a Sibyl (see the essay by S. Krauss in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xi. 120-131), a notion which proved the germ of some curious growths in mediaeval legend. The companion tradition of the Tiburtine Sibyl (cf. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics i. 580a) does appear to run back to the 4th century. Like the exploitation of Vergils eclogue as a Messianic prophecy, [Note: This lies side by side with the proof from the Sibylline oracles, in Constantines Orat. ad sanct. ccetum (19). Rendel Harris (HDB v. 67 f.) thinks that the Vergilian element in bk. xi., to which Dechent had already called attention, the references to aeneas and the claim of priority to Homer, must mark the period of Constantine as the date when the problem of the Christian Sibyls relation to Homer became acute.] it was one of several streams which flowed from almost the same soil as our Sibylline oracles, but the latter went their own way, and, if we are able to follow that way, even dimly, it is thanks to the Byzantine Christian who, in the 6th cent., cut the rough channel along which they have flowed down to us through the ramifications of early and mediaeval oracular literature.

Literature.-An ample bibliography will be found in Schrers GJV [Note: JV Geschichte des jdischen Volkes (Schrer).] iii.4 [Leipzig, 1909] 555-592, though heroes not mention some of the English contributions, like W. Whistons A Vindication of Sibylline Oracles (London, 1715) and J. Floyers similar volume, The Sibylline Oracles, translated from the best Greek Copies (London, 1713). The authenticity of the oracles formed a topic of discussion among the English Deists of the 18th cent., in connexion with prophecy, but the debate led to no critical advance, owing principally to the defective spirit of historical criticism and to the corrupt state of the text. The latter difficulty was eased by Angelo Mais discoveries of fresh material and Manuscripts at Milan and Rome (1817, 1828), on the basis of which. the first modern edition was published by a French scholar, C. Alexandre, Oracula Sibyllina, Paris, 1841-1856; the second edition of this standard work (1869) is not quite so full as the first. Almost simultaneously J. H. Friedlieb issued a short edition (Die sibyllinischen Weissagungen, Leipzig, 1852), with a German metrical version. Alexandres version had been in Latin. A. Rzachs edition of the text (Oracula Sibyllina, Vienna, 1891) is only one of a long series of contributions which he has made to the historical and textual criticism of this literature. Lastly, J. Geffcken edited the oracles critically for Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, Leipzig, 1902. Geffckens edition is not final, but it forms an indispensable basis for study. The Jewish oracles in bks. iii-v, together with the fragments, are translated into German by F. Blass in E. Kautzschs Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des AT [Note: T Altes Testament.] , Tbingen, 1900, ii. 177-217, and translated into English by H. C. O. Lanchester in Charless Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford, 1913, ii. 368-406. A German version of Christian oracles in bks. i-v and vi-viii., etc., is published by Geffcken in E. Henneckes Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, Tbingen, 1904, but there is no modern English version of them, even of selected passages. The blank verse translation by M. S. Terry, Kew York, 1890, the present writer has not been able to see. In addition to the authorities cited throughout the course of the article, he is specially indebted to the courtesy of Professor Walter Scott, formerly of Merton College, Oxford, and Toronto University, who has placed at this disposal unpublished materials relating to bks. iv. and viii.

James Moffatt.

Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church

SIBYLLINE ORACLES

Prophecies delivered, it is said, by certain women of antiquity, showing the fates and revolutions of kingdoms. We have a collection of them in eight books. Dr. Jorton observes, that they were composed at different times by different persons; first by Pagans, and then, perhaps, by Jews, and certainly by Christians. They abound with phrases, words, facts, and passages, taken from the LXX, and the New Testament. They are, says the Doctor, a remarkable specimen of astonishing impudence and miserable poetry, and seem to have been, from first to last, and without any one exception, mere impostures.

Fuente: Theological Dictionary

Sibylline Oracles

Sibylline Oracles is the name given to certain collections of supposed prophecies, emanating from the sibyls or divinely inspired seeresses, which were widely circulated in antiquity.

The derivation and meaning of the name Sibyl are still subjects of controversy among antiquarians. While the earlier writers (Eurìpides, Aristophanes, Plato) refer invariably to “the sibyl”, later authors speak of many and designate the different places where they were said to dwell. Thus Varro, quoted by Lactantius (Div. Instit., L, vi) enumerates ten sibyls: the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphian, the Cimmerian, the Erythræan, the Samarian, the Cumæan, and those of the Hellespont, of Phrygia, and of Tibur. The Sibyls most highly venerated in Rome were those of Cumæ and Erythræa.

In pagan times the oracles and predictions ascribed to the sibyls were carefully collected and jealously guarded in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and were consulted only in times of grave crises. Because of the vogue enjoyed by these heathen oracles and because of the influence they had in shaping the religious views of the period, the Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria, during the second century B.C. composed verses in the same form, attributing them to the sibyls, and circulated them among the pagans as a means of diffusing Judaistic doctrines and teaching. This custom was continued down into Christian times, and was borrowed by some Christians so that in the second or third century, a new class of oracles emanating from Christian sources came into being. Hence the Sibylline Oracles can be classed as Pagan, Jewish, or Christian. In many cases, however, the Christians merely revised or interpolated the Jewish documents, and thus we have two classes of Christian Oracles, those adopted from Jewish sources and those entirely written by Christians. Much difficulty is experienced in determining exactly how much of what remains is Christian and how much Jewish. Christianity and Judaism coincided on so many points that the Christians could accept without modification much that had come from Jewish pens. It seems clear, however, that the Christian Oracles and those revised from Jewish sources all emanated from the same circle and were intended to aid in the diffusion of Christianity. The Sibyls are quoted frequently by the early Fathers and Christian writers, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, Augustine, etc. Through the decline and disappearance of paganism, however, interest in them gradually diminished and they ceased to be widely read or circulated, though they were known and used during the Middle Ages in both the East and the West.

Large collections of these Jewish and Christian oracles are still in existence. In 1545 Xystus Betuleius (Sixtus Birken) published an edition of eight books of oracles with a preface dating from perhaps the sixth century A. D. At the beginning of the last century Cardinal Mai discovered four other books, which were not a continuation of the eight previously printed, but an independent collection. These are numbered XI, XII, XIII, XIV, in later editions. Alexandre published a valuable edition with a Latin translation (Paris, 1841-56), and a new and revised edition appeared from the pen of Geffcken (Leipzig, 1902) as one of the volumes in the Berlin Corpus. In addition to the books already enumerated several fragments of oracles taken from the works of Theophilus and Lactantius are printed in the later editions.

In form the Pagan, Christian, and Jewish Oracles are alike. They all purport to be the work of the sibyls, and are expressed in hexameter verses in the so-called Homeric dialect. The contents are of the most varied character and for the most part contain references to peoples, kingdoms, cities, rulers, temples, etc. It is futile to attempt to find any order in the plan which governed their composition. The perplexity occasioned by the frequent change of theme can perhaps be accounted for by the supposition that they circulated privately, as the Roman Government tolerated only the official collection, and that their present arrangement represents the caprice of different owners or collectors who brought them together from various sources. There is in some of the books a general theme, which can be followed only with difficulty. Though there are occasionally verses which are truly poetical and sublime, the general character of the Sibylline Oracles is mediocre. The order in which the books are enumerated does not represent their relative antiquity, nor has the most searching criticism been able accurately to determine how much is Christian and how much Jewish.

Book IV is generally considered to embody the oldest portions of the oracles, and while many of the older critics saw in it elements which were considered to be Christian, it is now looked on as completely Jewish. Book V has given rise to many divergent opinions, some claiming it as Jewish, others as the work of a Christian Jew, and others as being largely interpolated by a Christian. It contains so little that can be considered Christian that it can safely be set down as Jewish. Books VI and VII are admittedly of Christian origin. Some authors (Mendelssohn, Alexandre, Geffcken) describe Book VI as an heretical hymn, but this contention has no evidence in its favour. It dates most probably from the third century. Books I and II are regarded as a Christian revision of a Jewish original. Book VIII offers peculiar difficulties; the first 216 verses are most likely the work of a second century Jew, while the latter part (verses 217-500) beginning with an acrostic on the symbolical Christian word Icthus is undoubtedly Christian, and dates most probably from the third century. In the form in which they are now found the other four books are probably the work of Christian authors. Books XII and XIII are from the same pen, XII being a revision of a Jewish original. Book XI might have been written either by a Christian or a Jew in the third century, and Book XIV of the same doubtful provenance dates from the fourth century. The general conclusion is that Books VI, VII, and XIII and the latter part of Book VIII are wholly Christian. Books I, II, XI, XII, XIII, and XIV received their present form from a Christian. The peculiar Christian circle in which these compositions originated cannot be determined, neither can it be asserted what motive prompted their composition except as a means of Christian propaganda.

———————————–

GEFFCKEN, Komposition u. Entstehungszeit der Oracula Sibyllina (Leipzig, 1902); HARNACK, Gesch. der altchrist. Litt. (Leipzig, 1893), I, pt. ii, 581-89; II, pt. ii, 184-89; BARDENHEWER, Gesch. der altkirch. Litt., II (1902-3), 651, 656; SCHÜRER, Gesch. des jud. Volkes, III (Leipzig, 1910), 290 sqq.

PATRICK J. HEALY Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIIICopyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, February 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, D.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Sibylline Oracles

The ancient sibyls were, according to the popular belief, female soothsayers or prophetesses; who frequently delivered vaticinations, especially of a threatening character, and sometimes showed how to propitiate the wrath of the gods. The most celebrated of the number was the Cumsean, concerning whom there is the following fable: Apollo, having been enamoured of her, offered to give her what she should ask. She demanded to live as many years as she had grains of sand in her hand, but unfortunately forgot to ask for continued enjoyment of health and bloom. The god granted her request, but she refused in return to listen to his suit, and her longevity, without freshness and beauty, proved rather a burden than a benefit. It was supposed that she was to live about 1300 years, and at the expiration of this period she was to wither quite away, and be converted into a mere voice (Ovid, Metam. 14, 104; Serv. ad. Virg. En. vi, 321).. She is variously called Herophile, Demo, Phenomonoe, Deiphobe, Demophile, and Amalthea. She is said to have come to Italy from the East (Livy, i, 7), and she is the one who, according to most traditions, appeared before king Tarquinius, offering him the Sibylline Books for sale (Pliny, II. N. 13:28; Gellius, i, 19).

According to an ancient legend, the emperor Augustus Caesar repaired to the Tiburtine sibyl, to inquire whether he should consent to allow himself- to be Worshipped with divine honors, :which the senate had1decreed -to him. The sibyl, after some days of meditation, took the emperor apart and showed him an altar; and above the altar, in the opening heavens, and in a, glory of light, he beheld a beautiful virgin holding an infant in her arms, and at the same time a voice was heard saying, “This is the altar of the son of the living God ;” whereupon Augustus caused an altar to be erected upon Capitoline Hill, with this inscription, Ara Priimogeniti Dei; and on the same spot, in later times, was built the church called the Ara Cceli, well known, with its flight of 124 steps, to all who have visited Rome. A very rude but curious bass-relief, preserved in the church of the Ara Coli, is perhaps the oldest representation extant. The Church legend assigns-to it a fabulous antiquity; and it must be older than the 12th century, as it is alluded to by writers of that period. Here the emperor Augustus kneels before the Madonna and Child, and at his side is the sibyl Tiburtina, pointing upwards (Mrs. Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, p. 197).

I. Lost Works. The so-called Sibylline Books of antiquity were certain writings regarded with much veneration and guarded with great care. The legend concerning them is that a sibyl (some say the Curmseau, others the Ionian) came to Tarquin II (or Tarquin the Superb) with nine books, which she. offered to sell for a very high price. Tarquin refusing to purchase, the sibyl went away and burned three of the volumes. Returning, she asked the same price for the remaining six; and when Tarquin again refused to buy, she went and destroyed three more. She came once more to Tarquin demanding the same price for the three as she had for the nine. Her behavior struck the king, and upon his augurs advising him to do so, he bought the volumes. The sibyl disappeared and was never seen afterwards. The books were preserved with great care, and were called Sibylline Verses, etc. They were said to have been written on palm-leaves, partly in verse and partly in symbolical hieroglyphics. The public were never allowed to inspect them, but they were kept in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, preserved in a stone chest. A college of priests was appointed to have charge of them. It was the duty of this college to consult these books on all occasions when the gods manifested their wrath by inflicting calamities upon the Romans. The answers which were derived from them were almost invariably of a religious nature, as they either commanded the introduction of some new worship, or the institution of new ceremonies and festivals or the repetition of old ones. In B.C. 83, the Temple of Jupiter was burned and the Sibylline Books consumed. In order to restore them, commissioners were appointed to visit various places in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, to collect any Sibylline oracles that could be found. They collected about a thousand verses, which’ were placed in the Temple of Jupiter, after it had been destroyed. The Sibylline Books were also burned in the reign of Nero, in the reign of Julian (A.D. 363), and a fourth time in that of the emperor Hionorius (A.D. 395); but-they were restored each time. Notwithstanding many forgeries which had crept in, they were still held in great esteem. and we find them consulted even as late as the 6th century. See Anthon, Class. Dict. s.v. “Sibyllhe.”

II. Extant Writings. It is certain, from Roman history, that Sibylline oracles were committed to writing, and that Sibylline books were preserved; and it is a well-known fact that when the conquests of Alexander and the Romans in the East brought ins a period of religious syncretism, the faith of the nations in their traditional religions gave way to superstitions of every form, and was replaced no less by an interest in prophecies of every sort than by an inclination to the practice of secret arts. It is not strange, accordingly, that traces are found of a Chaldee and a Babylonian and even of a Hebrew sibyl. When Christianity began to assail heathenism with literary weapons, the belief in sibyls was wide-spread and general, and numerous professed- oracles were in circulation. Nor was Christendom itself disinclined to accept the popular belief upon this subject, or to turn that belief to its profit. The theologians and writers of the earliest period are especially open to this charge, e.g. Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clemens Alexandrinus. So general was the appeal to the Sibylline, oracles among these writers that their antagonist Celsus terms them friends, or even. manufacturers, of the sibyls (, Origen, Cont. Celsum, v, 61). The tendency was less apparent in the Western Church, though Lactantius makes more extended and reckless use of this form. of argument than does any other writer in either Church; and the writings of Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine are not free from favorable mention of the Sibylline Books. See Besancon, De l’Emploi que les Peres de l’Eglise ontfiait des Oracles Sibyllins (1851).

1. History of the Text. The Greek text of the Sibyllines was lost from sight during the Middle Ages, and it was reserved for certain humanists of the 16th century to unearth a number of manuscripts amid publish their contents to the world. The oracles are in each edition divided into eight books, but the text is everywhere exceedingly corrupt, and even marred by arbitrary emendations. The earliest critical editions date from the beginning, of our century, e.g. that of cardinal Mai (1817 and 1828), and subsequently appeared those of Alexandre (Paris, 1841) and Friedlieb (Leipsic, 1852). The number of manuscripts thus far recovered amounts to scarcely a dozen, and they have not vet been fully examined. They exhibit great divergences of both text and arrangement; the language and versification are not everywhere governed by the same standards-the language and even the phrases of Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and Pseudo- Orpheaus being contained in them, and no less those of the Septuagint and of the New Test. If to these considerations we add that entire sections are wanting from some manuscripts, and that whole sections have been added in others, and also that the numerous citations in the Church fathers from the Sibyllines afford no aid towards a settling of the text, it will be apparent that definite results in uthis field are scarcely to be expected. See Thorlacius, Libri Sibqyl. Veteris Ecclesica (Copenli. 1815); Volkmahn, De Ora-c. Sibyl. (Lips. 1853); Friedllieb, De Codd. Sibyl. (Bremen, 1847); Floder, Vestif/ii Homer, et Hesiod. in Oraecc. Sib. (Ups. 1770); and other monographs cited by Volbeding, Index Program. p. 14.

2. Contents. The results of criticism show that the Sibylline Books are the work of different authors, and that they originated in different countries and periods. The collection as -we now have it includes:

a. Jewish Elements. Scholars are generally agreed that book 3 is, upon the whole, the work of an Egyptian Jew, though based somewhat on already existent heathen oracles and corrupted by Christian interpolations. The description of historical events in this book reaches to the reign of Ptolemy Physcon (B.C. 170117), and is followed from that epoch by a fanciful forecasting of the future. To antagonize idolatry, especially under its Egyptian form, was evidently the object of the oracle, which to this end employs persuasion, historico – mythological description, and threatening prophecy–more commonly the latter, as might be supposed from the assumption of a Sibylline garb. The book enumerates successive world- powers though not in the manner of Daniel, and foretells a period of woe which should be ended by the advent of Messiah, who will overthrow his enemies, restore Judah, and gloriously deliver the saints. There is no unity of arrangement.

Book 4 belongs next in the order of chronology. It consists of not quite two hundred verses, and is complete in itself. The history of the world is traced through twelve generations, six of which are Assyrian, two Median, one Persian, and one Grecian. The eleventh covers the period of the Roman world-power, and the twelfth is the Messianic period. The events noted in the book as recent are the destruction of Jerusalem and the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79; that which is most immediately impending is the return of a matricidal emperor from his exile beyond the Euphrates to make, war on Rome. The date of its composition is easy to determine from these data. No specifically Christian elements appear, and the religious bearing. of the fragment upon the whole is difficult to determine. Its author was probably a Jewish Christian of the ordinary type, who had no conception of the contradiction involved in such a character.

Book 5 is a crux interpretum. The first fifty verses recite the list of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Hadrian, their names being indicated by the respective initial letters, etc. The internal evidence assigns the date of composition to the. close of Hadrian’s reign (A.D. 138). The description it gives of Nero as laying claim to divine honors, after he “‘.’shall have returned,” indicates a .Christian pen; but the Christian element is so little apparent that judicious critics regard the greater part of the book as a Jewish production. The repeated reference to Nero, the arch-enemy, seems to suggest. that the author wrote in Nero’s time, in which case it would become necessary to separate that portion of the book which reaches down to Hadrian, and upon this point scholars are greatly divided. The subject matter is largely eschatological, but lacks comprehensiveness of view, so that the author or compiler deals rather with the doom of particular cities and countries than with that of the world.

b. Christian Elements. Book 6 is a brief hymn on Jesus as the Son of God, which touches on his miracles, teachings, and death, and denounces, a prophetic curse on the Sodomitic land which wove for him the crown of thorns. In connection with the baptism in Jordan, it. introduces the fire mentioned in ancient gospels, and presents an idea of the dove greatly at variance with the canonical idea. It, has been supposed that a form of gnosis is here revealed to our notice; but the question may depend for. its answer on the connecting of this fragment with book 7. The latter also contains, among apparently disconnected oracles of threatening, a number of extended hymns on Christ, in which the baptism is again particularly referred to and a peculiar philosophy connected with it (the premundane Logos clothed with flesh by the Spirit), and in which, moreover, a ritual of sacrifice is. recommended (v, 76) to which the Church was an entire stranger. The only historical allusion which might afford a hint respecting the age of the books is that in which it is said that other Persians should reign” in the time of greatest trouble (the time then current?). The reference might perhaps apply to the beginning of the Sassanid rule.

Book 8 deals more extensively with ideas peculiar to Christianity than any of those described. It is composed of fragments and devoid of unity, but the first half (Num 34:1-29) makes the impression of a connected whole. It begins where book 5 left off, and assigns to Hadrian’s family three additional kings. A further reference to a king of different family (Sept. Severus), with his sons, may be a later interpolation. The book is intended to be a prophetic portrayal of the last judgment, but it includes a rehearsal of the life of Jesus, with the famous lines, thirty-four in number, which are known as the Sibylline Acrostic (v. 217-250)the initial letters forming the words (sic) . They were early recognised, e.g. by Eusebius and Augustine (Civ. Dei, 18, 23); but it is evident that they originated with a later hand. Neither the first nor the last of the lines is independent of the context in its structure. Lactantius cites at least one of the lines as having a different initial letter. The number of the lines is in some copies limited to twenty-seven; and the form has noparallel. The less extended second half (v. 361-501) contains nothing Sibylline in character, and is composed of fragments of Christian hymns. It-is supposed to belong to the close of the 4th century.

Books 1 and 2 are probably of later date than those, already discussed. No Christian writer earlier than the 5th century quotes from them, and they are remarkable because of the absence of all reference to Roman history. No definite fixing of their date is accordingly possible. They are distinguished by greater conformity to a settled plan than is found in the others, and doubtless owe to this quality the place they occupy at the head of the collection. The poem follows the outline of Genesis, from the creation and the fall of man, through successive generations, to Noah and the deluge. The sibyl is here introduced into the history, and is identified with Noah’s daughter-in-law. After Noah the “golden age” opens, then that of the Titans, and later the Messianic. Three kings are said, to reign in the golden age, who are identified by some critics with the sons of Kronos, and by others with the sons of Noah, or with the three patriarchs of early Hebrew history. The Titans are supposed to denote the entire series of heathen powers to the time of the Messiah. Book 1 continues the history through the destruction of Jerusalem and to the final dispersion of the Jews, while book ii deals chiefly with the last judgment. It is apparent that a portion of the poem has been lost from between the two books as they now exist, and it would seem that the loss of that section has deprived us of all hope of ascertaining the: time in which these books originated; but the facts that they were wholly unknown to the Church fathers, that even the sibyllomaniac Lactantius does not mention them, and that they are free from all trace of Chiliasm compel criticism, to assign their origin to a period later than that of the other books contained in the earlier collections.

c. The more recently discovered books (11-14) have not yet been thoroughly weighed in the scales of criticism, and opinions with regard to them are very diverse. Their contents are as follows:

Book 11 begins at the deluge and the tower of Babel, and follows the history down through the Egyptian, Persian, and Grecian dominions to the time of the Roman supremacy. In the progress of the poem Joseph and the exode are mentioned; and Homer, the Trojan war, Alexander and the Diadochi, the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Caesar and his successors, with their relations to Egypt, are all referred to. The book closes with a request from the sibyl for rest from the madness of inspiration, thus implying that it is the first part- of a continued poem. – The religious element is not made prominent, though the author was evidently acquainted with sacred history. A peculiar wealth of chronological statements and reckonings characterizes the book.

Book 12 begins with the reign of Augustus, and mentions the entire succession of Caesars, designating each individual by the numerical equivalent of his name, with the single exception of Alex. Severus. The absence of all reference to religious ideas is a very noticeable feature, though Vespasian is termed the annihilator of the righteous, and the coming of a is mentioned (ver. 30 sq.), who may be the Messiah, as v. 232 declares that in the reign of the first Roman sovereign “the word of the immortal God came upon the, earth.” The earliest victories .of the Sassanids over the Romans are, mentioned, and a repeated prayer from the sibyl for rest closes the book.

Much of the history of book 12 is inexplicable to us, and the same is true of book 13. It is fragmentary and brief and is almost exclusively devoted to Asiatic wars, the different Roman rulers being very indefinitely described. The situation of Oriental countries during the second half of the 3d century appears to have been more familiar to the author than it can be to us. The book is like those mentioned in the absence of religious references, and closes in the, usual form.

Book 14 is wholly inexplicable. Lists of emperors are given, but in such a manner as to render their identification impossible. The internal character of the book might suggest the idea that its author was an Egyptian living in the reign of Gallienus, who framed the history of the world and of the emperors in Sibylline verses,.. and added to. it a continuation drawn from a his own resources. No religious, and especially no Messianic, interest is apparent, unless the thought at the close (that after all of conflict shall be over, the earth shall enjoy undisturbed peace) might be regarded as Messianic.

The collection and arrangement of the Sibylline Books were evidently the work of comparatively recent hands, and were made in the interests of Christianity. Lactantius appears to have known them only as separate poems. Most of the manuscripts contain only the first eight books, and the differences of arrangement to be observed in them would indicate that, before the entire collection was completed, certain sections had been brought together. The loss of fragments and sections was the natural result of the scattered state in which the material existed; but the date of the last revision, which preserved the books against further losses, is wholly unknown.

3. Literature. In addition to works mentioned in the body of this article, see Blondel, Des Sibylles Celebres tant par lAntiquite Paeienne que par les S. Peres (1649); the elder Vossius, De Poetis Graec.. (1654); chmid, De Sib. Oracc. (1618); Boyle, De Sibyllis (1661); Nehring, Deutsche Uebersetz. d. sibyll. Weiss. (1702); id. Vesrtheid. d. sibyll. Prophezeihungen (1720); Vossius [Is.], De Oracc. Sibyll. (1680); Bleek, in the Berl. theol. Zeitschr. 1819, pt. i and ii; Lucke, Einl. in d. Apokalypse (2d ed. 1852); Ewald, Entstehung, Inhalt u. Werth d.; 14 sibyll. Bucher (1858); Dahne, Alexandr. Religionsphilosophie (1834), ii, 228; Grorer, Philo (1831), ii, 121 sq.; Hilgenfeld, Jiid. Apokal. in ihrer gesch. Eastwickeltag (1857), p. 51 sq.; Thorlacitus, Doctr. C/hrist. in Sibyl. Libr., in the Misc. Han. 1816, vol. i; Terry, The Sibylline Oracles (N. Y. 1890).

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

Sibylline Oracles

sibi-ln, -lin ora-k’lz. See APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE, B., V.

Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia