THE CUMÆAN SIBYL
A part of the monotonous coast-line of Palestine extends into the
Mediterranean considerably beyond the rest at Carmel. In this bluff
promontory the Holy Land reaches out, as it were, towards the Western
World; and like a tie-stone that projects from the gable of the first
of a row of houses, indicating that other buildings are to be added,
it shows that the inheritance of Israel was not meant to be always
exclusive, but was destined to comprehend all the countries which its
faith should annex. The remarkable geographical position of this long
projecting ridge by the sea--itself a symbol and prophecy--and its
peculiar physical features, differing from those of the rest of
Palestine, and approximating to a European type of scenery, early
marked it out as a religious spot. It was held sacred from time
immemorial; an altar existed there long before Elijah's discomfiture
of the priests of Baal; the people were accustomed to resort to the
sanctuary of its "high place" during new moons and Sabbaths; and to
its haunted strand came pilgrims from distant regions, to which the
fame of its sanctity had spread. One of the great schools of the
prophets of Israel, superintended by Elisha, was planted on one of its
mountain prominences. The solitary Elijah found a refuge in its bosom,
and came and went from it to the haunts of men like one of its own
sudden storms; and in its rocky dells and dense thickets of oaks and
evergreens were uttered prophecies of a larger history and a grander
salvation, which transcended the narrow circle of Jewish ideas as much
as the excellency of Carmel transcended the other landscapes of
Palestine.
To this instance of striking correspondence between the peculiar
nature of a spot and its peculiar religious history in Asia, a
parallel may be found in Europe. A part of the long uniform western
coast-line of Italy stretches out into the Mediterranean at Cumæ, near
the city of Naples. Early colonists from Greece, in search of a new
home, found in its bays, islands, and promontories a touching
resemblance to the intricate coast scenery of their own country. On a
solitary rock overlooking the sea they built their citadel and
established their worship. In this rock was the traditional cave of
the Cumæan Sibyl, where she gave utterance to the inspirations of
pagan prophecy a thousand years before St. John received the visions
of the Apocalypse on the lone heights of the Ægean isle. The
promontory of Cumæ, like that of Carmel, typified the onward course of
history and religion--a great advance in men's ideas upon those of the
past. The western sea-board is the historic side of Italy. All its
great cities and renowned sites are on the western side of the
Apennines; the other side, looking eastward, with the exception of
Venice and Ravenna, containing hardly any place that stands out
prominently in the history of the world. And at Cumæ this western
tendency of Italy was most pronounced. On this westmost promontory of
the beautiful land--the farthest point reached by the oldest
civilisation of Egypt and Greece--the Sibyl stood on her watch-tower,
and gazed with prophetic eye upon the distant horizon, seeing beyond
the light of the setting sun and "the baths of all the western stars"
the dawn of a more wonderful future, and dreamt of a--
"Vast brotherhood of hearts and hands,
Choir of a world in perfect tune."
Cumæ is only five miles distant from Puteoli, and about thirteen west
of Naples. But it lies so much out of the way that it is difficult to
combine it with the other famous localities in this classic
neighbourhood in one day's excursion, and hence it is very often
omitted. It amply, however, repays a special visit, not so much by
what it reveals as by what it suggests. There are two ways by which it
can be approached, either by the _Via Cumana_, which gradually ascends
from Puteoli along the ridge of the low volcanic hills on the western
side of Lake Avernus, and passes under the Arco Felice, a huge brick
arch, evidently a fragment of an ancient Roman aqueduct, spanning a
ravine at a great height; or directly from the western shore of Lake
Avernus, by an ancient road paved with blocks of lava, and leading
through an enormous tunnel, called the _Grotta de Pietro Pace_, about
three-quarters of a mile long, lighted at intervals by shafts from
above, said to have been excavated by Agrippa. Both ways are deeply
interesting; but the latter is perhaps preferable because of the
saving of time and trouble which it effects.
The first glimpse of Cumæ, though very impressive to the imagination,
is not equally so to the eye. Crossing some cultivated fields, a bold
eminence of trachytic tufa, covered with scanty grass and tufts of
brushwood, rises between you and the sea, forming part of a range of
low hills, which evidently mark the ancient coast-line. On this
elevated plateau, commanding a most splendid view of the blue, sunlit
Mediterranean as far as Gaeta and the Ponza Islands, stood the almost
mythical city; and crowning its highest point, where a rocky
escarpment, broken down on every side except on the south, by which it
can be ascended, the massive foundations of the walls of the Acropolis
may still be traced throughout their whole extent. Very few relics of
the original Greek colony survive; and these have to be sought chiefly
underneath the remains of Roman-Gothic and medieval dynasties, which
successively occupied the place, and partially obliterated each other,
like the different layers of writing in a palimpsest. Time and the
passions of man have dealt more ruthlessly with this than with almost
any other of the renowned spots of Italy. Some fragments of the
ancient fortifications, a confused and scattered heap of ruins within
the line of the city walls, and a portion of a fluted column, and a
single Doric capital of the grand old style, supposed to belong to the
temple of Apollo, on the summit of the Acropolis, are all that meet
the eye to remind us of this home of ancient faith and prophecy. In
the plain at the foot of the rock is the Necropolis of Cumæ, the most
ancient burial-place in Italy, from whose rifled Greek graves a most
valuable collection of archaic vases and personal ornaments were
obtained and transferred to the museums of Naples, Paris, and St.
Petersburg; but the tombs themselves have now been destroyed, and only
a few marble fragments of Roman sepulchral decoration scattered around
indicate the spot. And not far off, partially concealed by earth and
underwood, may be seen the ruins of the amphitheatre, with its
twenty-one tiers of seats leading down to the arena.
You look in vain for any trace of the sanctuary of the most celebrated
of the Sibyls. Her tomb is pointed out as a vague ruin a short
distance from the Necropolis, among the tombs which line the Via
Domitiana; and Justin Martyr and Pausanias both describe a round
cinerary urn found in this spot which was said to have contained her
ashes. The tufa rock of the Acropolis is pierced with numerous dark
caverns and labyrinthine passages, the work of prehistoric
inhabitants, which have only been partially explored on account of the
difficulty and danger, and any one of which might have been the abode
of the prophetess. A larger excavation in the side of the hill facing
the sea, with a flight of steps leading up from it into another
smaller recess, and numerous lateral openings and subterranean
passages, supposed to penetrate into the very heart of the mountain,
and even to communicate with Lake Fusaro, is pointed out by the local
guides as the Sibyl's Cave, which, as Virgil tells us, had a hundred
entrances and issues, from whence as many resounding voices echoed
forth the oracles of the inspired priestess. But we are confused in
our efforts at identification; for another cavern bore this name in
former ages, which was destroyed by the explosion of the combustible
materials with which Narses filled it in undermining the citadel.
This, we have reason to believe, was the cave which Justin Martyr
visited more than seventeen hundred years ago, and of which he has
left behind a most interesting account. "We saw," he says, "when we
were in Cumæ, a place where a sanctuary is hollowed in the rock--a
thing really wonderful and worthy of all admiration. Here the Sibyl
delivered her oracles, we were told by those who had received them
from their ancestors, and who kept them even as their patrimony. Also,
in the middle of the sanctuary, they showed us three receptacles cut
in the same rock, and in which, they being filled with water, she
bathed, as they said, and when she resumed her garments, she retired
into the inner part of the sanctuary, likewise cut in the same rock,
and there being seated on a high place in the centre, she prophesied."
But after all you do not care to fasten your attention upon any
particular spot, for you feel that the whole place is overshadowed by
the presence of this mysterious being; and rock, and hill, and bush
are invested with an air of solemn majesty, and with the memory of an
ancient sanctity.
Nature has taken back the ruins of Cumæ so completely to her own
bosom, that it is difficult to believe that on this desolate spot once
stood one of the most powerful cities of antiquity, which colonised a
large part of Southern Italy. A sad, lonely, fateful place it is,
haunted for ever by the gods of old, the dreams of men. A silence,
almost painful in its intensity, broods over its deserted fields;
hardly a living thing disturbs the solitude; and the traces of man's
occupancy are few and faint. The air seems heavy with the breath of
the malaria; and no one would care to run the risk of fever by
lingering on the spot to watch the sunset gilding the gloom of the
Acropolis with a halo of kindred radiance. Every breeze that stirs the
tall grasses and the leaves of the brushwood of the dismantled citadel
has a wail in it; the long-drawn murmur of the peaceful sea at the
foot of the hill comes up with a melancholy cadence to the ear; and
even on the beautiful cyclamens and veronicas that strive to enliven
the ruins of the temples of Apollo and Serapis, emblems of the
immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are,
has fallen the gray shadow of the past. Each pathetic bit of ruin has
about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its
very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any
historical associations. "Time here seems to have folded its wings."
In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one
day. Through all the dim ages no feature of its rugged face has
changed; and all the potent spell of summer noons can only win from it
a languid smile of faintest verdure. The sight of the scanty walls and
scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless
ages that have left no other memorials of their activity. What is fact
and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away
borderland where they seem to blend. And I do not envy the man who is
not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that
placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe
with which the mysterious divinity of Cumæ was worshipped by
generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves--whose very
graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages
before our history had begun.
Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the
Sibyl. It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later
Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid
by some in Cumæ--where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of
his life in exile--and by others in Rome. But the majority of writers
associate it with the building of the great temple of Jupiter on the
Capitoline Hill. Several prodigies, significant of the future fate of
Rome and of the reigning dynasty, occurred when the foundations of
this temple were dug and the walls of it built. A fresh human head,
dripping gore, was found deep down beneath the earth, which implied
that this spot was destined to become the head of the whole world; and
hence the old name of the "Saturnine Hill" was changed to the
"Capitoline." All the gods who had been worshipped from time
immemorial on this hill, when consulted by auguries, gave permission
for the removal of their shrines and altars in order that room might
be provided for the gigantic temple of the great Ruler of the gods,
save Terminus and Youth, who refused to abandon the sacred spot, and
whose obstinacy was therefore regarded as a sign that the boundaries
of the city should never be removed, and that her youth would be
perpetually renewed. But a still more wonderful sign of the future of
Rome was given on this occasion. A mysterious woman, endowed with
preternatural longevity--believed to be no other than Deiphobe, the
Cumæan Sibyl herself, the daughter of Circe and Gnostus, who had been
the guide of Æneas into the world of the dead--appeared before Tarquin
and offered him for a certain price nine books, which contained her
prophecies in mystic rhyme. Tarquin, ignorant of the value of the
books, refused to buy them. The Sibyl departed, and burned three of
them. Coming back immediately, she offered the remaining six at the
same price that she had asked for the nine. Tarquin again refused;
whereupon the Sibyl burned three more volumes, and returning the third
time, made the same demand for the reduced remnant. Struck with the
singularity of the proceeding, the king consulted the augurs; and
learning from them the inestimable preciousness of the books, he
bought them, and the Sibyl forthwith vanished as mysteriously as she
had appeared. This legend reads like a moral apothegm on the
increasing value of life as it passes away.
Whatever credence we may attach to this account of their origin--or
rather, whatever sediment of historical truth may have been
precipitated in the fable--there can be no doubt that the so-called
Sibylline books of Rome did actually exist, and that for a very long
period they were held in the highest veneration. They were concealed
in a stone chest, buried under the ground, in the temple of Jupiter,
on the Capitol. Two officers of the highest rank were appointed to
guard them, whose punishment, if found unfaithful to their trust, was
to be sewed up alive in a sack and thrown into the sea. The number of
guardians was afterwards increased, at first to ten and then to
fifteen, whose priesthood was for life, and who in consequence were
exempted from the obligation of serving in the army and from other
public offices in the city. Being regarded as the priests of Apollo,
they had each in front of his house a brazen tripod, similar to that
on which the priestess of Delphi sat.
The contents of the Sibylline books, being supposed to contain the
fate of the Roman Empire, were kept a profound secret, and only on
occasions of public danger or calamity, and by special order of the
senate, were they allowed to be consulted. When the Capitol was burned
in the Marsic war, eighty-two years before Christ, they perished in
the flames: but so seriously was the loss regarded that ambassadors
were sent to Greece, Asia Minor, and Cumæ, wherever Sibylline
inspiration was supposed to exist, to collect the prophetic oracles,
and thus make up as far as possible for what had been lost. In Cumæ
nothing was discovered; but at Erythræa and Samos a large number of
mystic verses, said to have been composed by the Sibyl, were found.
Some of them were collected into a volume, after having been purged
from all spurious or suspected elements; and the volume was brought to
Rome, and deposited in two gilt cases at the base of the statue of
Apollo, in the temple of that god on the Palatine.
More than two thousand prophetic books, pretending to be Sibylline
oracles, were found by Augustus in the possession of private persons;
and these were condemned to be burned, and in future no private person
was allowed to keep any writings of the kind. But in spite of every
attempt to authenticate the books that were publicly accepted, the new
collection was never regarded with the same veneration as the original
volumes of Tarquin which it replaced. A certain suspicion of
spuriousness continued to cling to it, and greatly diminished its
authority. It was seldom consulted. The Roman emperors after
Tiberius--who still further sifted it--utterly neglected the
received collection; and not till shortly before the fatal battle of
the Milvian Bridge, which overthrew paganism, was it again brought
out, by Maxentius, for the purpose of indicating the fate of the
enterprise. Julian the Apostate, in his attempt to galvanise the dead
pagan religion into the semblance of life, sought to revive an
interest in the Sibylline oracles, which were so closely identified
with the political and religious fortunes of Rome. But his effort was
vain: they fell into greater oblivion than before; and at last they
were publicly burned by Stilicho, the father-in-law of the Emperor
Honorius--called the Defender of Italy--whose own execution as a
traitor at Ravenna shortly afterwards was considered by the pagan
zealots as the just vengeance of the gods on his dreadful sacrilege.
Unlike the Jewish and Indian faiths, the Greek and Roman religions had
no authoritative writings, and were not embodied in a system of
elaborate dogmas. The Sibylline oracles may therefore be said to have
formed their sacred scriptures, and to have served the purpose of a
common religious creed in securing national unity. The original books
of the Cumæan Sibyl were written in Greek, which was the language of
the whole of the south of Italy at that time. The oracles were
inscribed upon palm leaves; to which circumstance Virgil alludes in
his description of the sayings of the Cumæan Sibyl being written upon
the leaves of the forest. They were in the form of acrostic verses;
the letters of the first verse of each oracle containing in regular
sequence the initial letters of all the subsequent verses. They were
full of enigmas and mysterious analogies, founded upon the numerical
value of the initial letters of certain names. It is supposed that
they contained not so much predictions of future events, as directions
regarding the means by which the wrath of the gods, as revealed by
prodigies and calamities, might be appeased. They seemed to have been
consulted in the same way as Eastern nations consult the Koran and
Hafiz. There was no attempt made to find a passage suitable to the
occasion, but one of the palm leaves after being shuffled was selected
at random. To this custom of drawing fateful leaves from the Sibylline
books--called in consequence _sortes sibyllinæ_--there is frequent
allusion by classic authors. We know that the writings of Homer and
Virgil were thus treated. The elevation of Septimius Severus to the
throne of the Roman Empire was supposed to have been foretold by the
circumstance that he opened by chance the writings of Lampridius at
the verse, "Remember, Roman, with imperial sway to rule the people."
The Bible itself was used by the early Christians for such purposes of
divination. St. Augustine, though he condemned the practice as an
abuse of the Divine Word, yet preferred that men should have recourse
to the Gospels rather than to heathen works. Heraclius is reported by
Cedrenus to have asked counsel of the New Testament, and to have been
thereby persuaded to winter in Albania. Nicephorus Gregoras frequently
opened his Psalter at random in order that there he might find support
in the trial under which he laboured. And even in these enlightened
days, it is by no means rare to find superstitious men and women using
the sacred Scriptures as the old Greeks and Romans used the Sibylline
oracles--dipping into them by chance for indications of the Divine
Will.
The Cumæan Sibyl was not the only prophetess of the kind. There were
no less than ten females, endowed with the gift of prevision, and held
in high repute, to whom the name of Sibyl was given. We read of the
Persian Sibyl, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Erythræan, the
Hellespontine, the Phrygian, and the Tiburtine. With the name of the
last-mentioned Sibyl tourists make acquaintance at Tivoli. Two ancient
temples in tolerable preservation are still standing on the very edge
of the deep rocky ravine through which the Anio pours its foaming
flood. The one is a small circular building, with ten pillars
surrounding the broken-down cella, whose familiar appearance is often
represented in plaster models and bronze and marble ornamental
articles, taken home as souvenirs by travellers; and the other stands
close by, and has been transformed into the present church of St.
Giorgio. This latter temple is supposed, from a bas-relief found in
it, representing the Sibyl sitting in the act of delivering an oracle,
to be the ancient shrine of the Sibyl Albunea mentioned by Horace,
Tibullus, and Lactantius. The earliest bronze statues at Rome were
those of the three Sibyls, placed near the Rostra, in the middle of
the Forum. No specimens of the literature of Rome precede the
Sibylline books, except the rude hymn known as the Litany of the Arval
Brothers, dating from the time of Romulus himself, which is simply an
address to Mars, the Lares, and the Semones, praying for fair weather
and for protection to the flocks. And it is thus most interesting to
notice that the two compositions which lay at the foundation of all
the splendid Latin literature of later ages were of an eminently
religious character.
One of the most remarkable things connected with the pagan Sibyls were
the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave
rise. When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out
of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic
literature. This literature emanated from different nationalities and
different schools of thought. It combined classical story and
Scripture tradition. Most of it was the product of pre-Christian
Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great national
excitement. The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy
beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future. The
books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical
form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use;
and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the
Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as
genuine did not hesitate to say that the writers of the Bible had
plagiarised parts of their prophecies from the oracles of the Sibyls.
Few fragments of the genuine Sibylline books remain to us, and these
are to be found chiefly in the writings of Ovid and Virgil, whose
"Golden Age" and well-known "Fourth Eclogue" were greatly indebted for
their materials to them. But we possess a large collection of the
Judæo-Christian oracles, which were probably gathered together by some
unknown editor in the seventh century. Originally there were fourteen
books of unequal antiquity and value, but some of them have been lost.
Cardinal Angelo Mai discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan a
manuscript which contained the eleventh book entire, besides a portion
of the sixth and eighth books; and a few years later, among the secret
stores of the Vatican Library, he found two other manuscripts which
contained entire the last four books of the collection. These were
published in Rome in 1828. The best edition of all the extant books is
that which M. Alexandre issued in Paris, under the name of _Oracula
Sibyllina_. This editor exaggerates the extent of the Christian
element in the Sibylline prophecies; but his dissertation on the
origin and value of the several portions of the books is exceedingly
interesting. The oldest book is undoubtedly the third, part of which
is preserved in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch, and originally
consisted of one thousand verses, most of which we possess. It was
probably composed at the beginning of the Maccabean period, about 146
B.C., when Ptolemy VII. (Physcon) had become king of Egypt, and the
bitter enemy of the Jews in Alexandria, and when the Jewish nation in
Palestine had been rejoicing in their independence, through the
overthrow of the empire of the Seleucidæ by the usurper Tryphon. The
fourth book was written soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in the
year of our era 79, and is a most interesting record of Jewish
Essenism. It contains the first anticipation of the return of Nero,
but in a Jewish form, without Nero's death and resuscitation. The last
of the Sibylline books seems to have been written about the beginning
of the seventh century, and was directed against the new creed of
Islam, which had suddenly sprung up, and in its fierce fanaticism was
carrying everything before it. In this apocalyptic literature--the
last growth of Judaism--the voice of paganism itself was employed to
witness for the supremacy of the Jewish religion. It embraces all
history in one great theocratic view, and completes the picture of the
Jewish triumph by the prophecy of a great Deliverer, who shall
establish the Jewish law as the rule of the whole earth, and shall
destroy with a fiery flood all that is corrupt and perishable. In
these respects the Jewish Sibylline oracles have an interesting
connection with other apocryphal Jewish writings, such as the Fourth
Book of Esdras, the Apocalypse of Henoch, and the Book of Jubilees;
and they may all be regarded as attempts to carry down the spirit of
prophecy beyond the canonical Scriptures, and to furnish a supplement
to them.
So highly prized was this group of apocryphal Jewish oracles by the
primitive Christians, that several new ones were added to them by
Christian hands which have not come down to us in their original
state. They were regarded as genuine productions, possessing an
independent authority which, if not divine, was certainly
supernatural; and some did not hesitate even to place them by the side
of the Old Testament prophecies. In the very earliest controversies
between Christians and the advocates of paganism, they were appealed
to frequently as authorities which both recognised. Christian
apologists of the second century, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, and
very specially Justin Martyr, implicitly relied upon them as
indisputable. Even the oracles of the pagan Sibyl were regarded by
Christian writers with an awe and reverence little short of that which
they inspired in the minds of the heathen themselves. Clement of
Alexandria does not scruple to call the Cumæan Sibyl a true
prophetess, and her oracles saving canticles. And St. Augustine
includes her among the number of those who belong to the "City of
God." And this idea of the Sibyl's sacredness continued to a late age
in the Christian Church. She had a place in the prophetic order beside
the patriarchs and prophets of old, and joined in the great procession
of the witnesses for the faith from Seth and Enoch down to the last
Christian saint and martyr. In one of the grandest hymns of the Roman
Catholic Church, composed by Tommaso di Celano at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, there is an allusion to her, taken from the
well-known acrostic in the last judgment scene in the eighth book of
the _Oracula Sibyllina_--
"Dies iræ, dies illa,
Solvet sæclum in favilla,
Teste David cum _Sibylla_."
The strange Italian mystic of the fifteenth century, Pico della
Mirandola, who sought to reconcile the Christian sentiment with the
imagery and legends of pagan religion, rehabilitated the Sibyl, and
consecrated her as the servant of the Lord Jesus. And he was but a
specimen of the many _humanists_ of that age who believed that no
oracle that had once spoken to living men and women could ever wholly
lose its vitality. Like the Delphic Pythia, old, but clothed as a
maiden, the ancient Sibyl appeared to them in the garments of
immortal youth, with the charm of her early prime.
The dim old church of Ara Coeli in Rome, which occupies the site of
the celebrated temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and in which Gibbon
conceived the idea of his great work on the _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_, is said to have derived its name from an altar bearing
the inscription, "Ara Primogeniti Dei," erected in this place by
Augustus, to commemorate the Sibylline prophecy of the coming of our
Saviour. She was a favourite subject of Christian art in the middle
ages, and was introduced by almost every celebrated painter, along
with the prophets and apostles, into the cyclical decorations of the
Church. Every visitor to Rome knows the fine picture of the Sibyls by
Pinturicchio, on the tribune behind the high altar of the Church of
St. Onofrio, where Tasso was buried; and also the still grander head
of the Cumæan Sibyl, with its flowing turban by Domenichino, in the
great picture gallery of the Borghese Palace. But the highest honour
ever conferred upon the Sibyls was that which Michael Angelo bestowed
when he painted them on the spandrils of the wonderful roof of the
Sistine Chapel. These mysterious beings formed most congenial subjects
for the mystic pencil of the great Florentine, and therefore they are
more characteristic of his genius than almost any other of his works.
He has painted them along with the greater prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, Daniel, Jonah, in throne-like niches surrounding the
different incidents of the creation. They look like presiding deities,
remote from all human weaknesses, and wearing on their faces an air of
profound mystery. They are invested, not with the calm, superficial,
unconscious beauty of pagan art, but with the solemn earnestness and
travail of soul characteristic of the Christian creed, wrinkled and
saddened with thought and worn out with vigils; and are striking
examples of the truth, that while each human being can bear his own
burden, the burden of the world's mystery and pain crushes us to the
earth. The Persian Sibyl, the oldest of the weird sisterhood, to whom
the sunset of life had given mystical lore, holds a book close to her
eyes, as if from dimness of vision; the Libyan Sibyl lifts a massive
volume above her head on to her knees; the Cumæan Sibyl intently reads
her book at a distance from her dilated eyes; the Erythræan Sibyl,
bareheaded, is about to turn over the page of her book; while the
Delphic Sibyl, like Cassandra the youngest and most human-looking of
them all, holds a scroll in her hand, and gazes with a dreamy
mournfulness into the far futurity. These splendid creations would
abundantly reward the minute study of many days. They show how
thoroughly the great painter had entered into the history and spirit
of these mysterious prophetesses, who, while they bore the sins and
sorrows of a corrupt world, had power to look for consolation into the
secrets of the future.
Very beautiful was this reverence paid to the Sibyl amid all the
idolatries of paganism and the corruptions of later Judaism. We may
regard it as a relic of the early piety of the world. One who could
pass over the interests and distractions of her own time, and fix her
gaze upon the distant future, must have seemed far removed from the
common order of mankind, who live exclusively in the present, and can
imagine no other or higher state of things than they see around them.
Standing as the heirs of all the ages on this elevated vantage-ground
and looking back upon the long course of the centuries--upon the
eventful future of the Sibyl, which is the past to us--it seems a
matter of course that the world should have spun down the ringing
grooves of change as it has done; and we fancy that this must have
been obvious to the world's gray fathers. But though the age of the
Sibyl seemed the very threshold of time, there was nothing to indicate
this to her, nothing to show that she lived in the youth of the world,
and that it was destined to ripen and expand with the process of the
suns. The same horizon that bounds us in these last days, bound her
view in these early days; and things seemed as fully developed and
stereotyped then as now, and to-morrow promised to be only a
repetition of to-day. To realise, therefore, that the world had a
future, and to take the trouble of thinking what would happen a
thousand years off, indicated no common habit of mind.
And we are the more impressed by it when we consider the spots
bewitched by the spell of Circe where it was exercised. That persons
dwelling in lonely, northern isles, where the long wash of the waves
upon the shore, and the wild wail of the wind in mountain corries
stimulated the imagination, and seemed like voices from another world,
should see visions and dream dreams, does not surprise us. The power
of second sight may seem natural to spots where nature is mysterious
and solemn, and full of change and sudden transitions from storm to
calm and from sunshine to gloom. But at Cumæ there is a perpetual
peace, an unchanging monotony. The same cloudless sky overarches the
earth day after day, and dyes to celestial blue the same placid sea
that sleeps beside its shore. The fields are drowsy at noon with the
same stagnant sunshine; and the same purple glory lies at sunset on
the entranced hills; and the olive and the myrtle bloom through the
even months with no fading or brightening tint on leaf or stem; and
each day is the twin of that which has gone before. Nature in such a
region is transparent. No mist, or cloud, or shadow hides her secrets.
There is no subtle joy of despair and hope, of decay and growth,
connected with the passing of the seasons. In this Arcadian clime we
should expect Nature to lull the soul into the sleep of contentment on
her lap; and in its perpetual summer happy shepherds might sing
eclogues for ever, and, satisfied with the present, have no hope or
wish for the future. How wonderful, then, that in such a charmed
lotus-land we should meet with the mysterious unrest of soul, and the
fixed onward look of the Sibyl to times widely different from her
own.
And not only is this forward-looking gaze of the Sibyl contrary to
what we should have expected in such a changeless land of beauty and
ease; it is also contrary to what we should have expected from the
paganism of the people. It is characteristic of the Greek religion, as
indeed of all heathen religions, that its golden age should be in the
past. It instinctively clings to the memory of a former happier time,
and shrinks from the unknown future. Its piety ever looks backward,
and aspires to present safety or enjoyment by a faithful imitation of
an imaginary past. It is always "returning on the old well-worn path
to the paradise of its childhood," and contrasting the gloom that
overhangs the present with the radiance that shone on the morning
lands. In every crisis of terror or disaster it turns with unutterable
yearnings to the tradition of the happy age. Or, if it does look
forward to the future, it always pictures "the restoration of the old
Saturnian reign"; it has no standard of future excellence or future
blessedness to attain to, and no yearnings for consummation and
perfection hereafter. The very name given to the south of Italy was
Hesperia, the "Land of the Evening Star," as if in token of its
exhausted history; and it was regarded as the scene of the fabled
golden age from which Saturn and the ancient deities had been expelled
by Jupiter. But contrary to this pagan instinct, the Cumæan Sibyl
stretched forward to a distant heaven of her aspirations and hopes--to
a nobler future of the world, not sentimental and idyllic, but epic
and heroic. She pictured the blessing or restoration of this earth
itself as distinct from an invisible world of happiness. And in this
respect she is more in sympathy with the Jewish and Christian
religions than with her own. The golden age of the Hebrews was in the
future, and was connected with the coming of the Messiah, who should
restore the kingdom again unto Israel. And the characteristic of the
Christian religion is hope, the expectation of the times of the
restitution of all things, and the realisation of the "one far-off
divine event to which the whole creation moves." It is this hopeful
element pervading them that gives to the lively oracles of Holy
Scripture the triumphant tone which distinguishes them so markedly
from the desponding spirit of all false religions, ancient and modern.
The subject of the Sibyl brings us to the vexed question of the
connection between pagan and Hebrew prophecy. How are we to regard the
vaticinations of the heathen oracle? That the great mass of the
Sibylline books is spurious is glaringly obvious. But there is a
primitive residuum which seems to remind us that the spirit of early
prophecy still retained its hold over human nature amid all the
corruptions of heathendom, and secured for the Sibyl a sacred rank and
authority. We have seen with what reverence the greatest fathers of
the Christian Church regarded her. While there was undoubtedly much
delusion and deception, conscious or unconscious, mixed up with it, we
are constrained at the same time to acknowledge that there was some
reality in this prophetic element of paganism, which cannot be
explained away as the result of mere political or intellectual
foresight or accidental coincidence. It was not all imposture. As a
ray of light is contained in all that shines, so a ray of God's truth
was reflected in what was best in this pagan prophecy. The fulfilment
of many of the ancient oracles cannot be denied without a perversion
of all history. There was no doubt an immense difference between the
Hebrew prophets and the pagan Sibyl. The predictions of the Sibyl were
accompanied by strange fantastic circumstances, and wore the
appearance of a blind caprice or arbitrary fate; whereas the
announcements of the Hebrew prophets, founded upon the denunciation of
moral evil and the reign of sacred and peremptory principles of
righteousness in the world, were calm, dignified, and self-consistent.
But we cannot, notwithstanding, deny to pagan prophecy some share in
the higher influence which inspired and moulded Hebrew prophecy. The
apostle of the Gentiles took this view when he called Epimenides the
Cretan a prophet. The Bible recognises the existence of true prophets
outside the pale of the Jewish Church. Balaam, the son of Beor, was a
heathen living in the mountains beyond the Euphrates; and yet the form
as well as the substance of his prophecy was cast into the same mould
as that of the Hebrew prophets. He is called in the Book of Numbers
"the man whose eyes are open;" and God used this power as His organ of
intercourse with and influence upon the world. The grand record of his
vision is the first example of prophetic utterance respecting the
destinies of the world at large; and we see how the base and
grovelling nature of the man was overpowered by the irresistible force
of the prophetic impulse within him, so that he was constrained to
bless the enemies he was hired to curse. And in this respect he
represents the purest of the ancient heathen oracles; and his answer
to Balak breathes the very essence of prophetic inspiration, and is
far in advance of the spirit and thought of the time, reminding us of
the noble rebuke of the Cumæan Sibyl to Aristodicus, and of the oracle
of Delphi to Glaucus.
God did not leave the Gentile nations without some glimpses of the
truth which He had revealed so fully and brightly to His own chosen
people. While He was the _glory_ of His people Israel, we must not
forget that He was a light to lighten the Gentiles. He gave to them
oracles and sibyls, who had the "open eye," and saw the vision of the
years, and witnessed to a light shining in the darkness, and brought
God nearer to a faithless world. Beneath the gross external polytheism
of the multitude there were deep, primitive springs of godliness, pure
and undefiled, working out their manifestation in noble lives; and
those who have ears to hear can listen to the sound of these ancient
streams as they flow into the river of life that makes glad the city
of our God. We gain immensely by considering the prophetical spirit of
Israel as a typical endowment, and the training of the Jews in the
household of God, and under His own immediate eye, as the key to the
right apprehension of the training of Greece and Rome. The unconscious
prophecies of heathendom pointed in their own way, as well as the
articulate divine prophecies of Israel, to the coming of Him who is
the Desire of all nations, and the true Light that lighteth every man
that cometh into the world. The wise men of Greece saw the sign of the
Son of Man in some such way as the Magi saw the star in the East. They
were, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, "Memnons waiting for
the day." And not without deep significance did the female soothsayer
from the oracle of Dionysius, the prophet-god of the Macedonians, whom
Paul and Silas met when they first landed on European soil, greet them
with the words, "These men are the servants of the most high God,
which show unto us the way of salvation." In that wonderful confession
we recognise the last utterance of the oracle of Delphi and the Sibyl
of Cumæ, as they were cast out by a higher and truer faith. Their
mission was accomplished and their shrine deserted when God's way was
known upon the earth, and His saving health among all nations.
"And now another Canaan yields
To thine all-conquering ark;
Fly from the 'old poetic fields,'
Ye Paynim shadows dark!
Immortal Greece, dear land of glorious lays,
Lo! here the unknown God of thine unconscious praise.
"The olive wreath, the ivied wand,
'The sword in myrtles drest,'
Each legend of the shadowy strand
Now wakes a vision blest;
As little children lisp, and tell of heaven,
So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given."