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EARLY DOCUMENTS 
SERIES II 

HELLENISTIC-JEWISH TEXTS 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

BOOKS III-V 

π 
Ιϊ Π 

 THE 

SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

BOOKS III-V 

BY THE 

REV. H. N. BATE, M.A. 

•H<immnWBiJtl4b>J..,*. lì 

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING 
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE 

LONDON: 68, HAYMARKET, S.W. i. 
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

58 956 

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,ιίΐΐ»!· 

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EDITORS' PREFACE 

THE object of this series of translations is primarily 
to furnish students with short, cheap, and handy text 
books, which, it is hoped, will facilitate the study of the 
particular texts in class under competent teachers. But 
it is also hoped that the volumes will be acceptable to 
the general reader who may be interested in the subjects 
with which they deal. It has been thought advisable, as 
a general rule, to restrict the notes and comments to 
a small compass ; more especially as, in most cases, 
excellent works of a more elaborate character are avail 
able. Indeed, it is much to be desired that these 
translations may have the effect of inducing readers to 
study the larger works. 

Our principal aim, in a word, is to make some diffi 
cult texts, important for the study of Christian origins, 
more generally accessible in faithful and scholarly 
translations. 

In most cases these texts are not available in a cheap 
and handy form. In one or two cases texts have been 
included of books which are available in the official 
Apocrypha; but in every such case reasons exist for 
putting forth these texts in a new translation, with an 
Introduction, in this series. 

W. O. E. OSTERLEY. 
G. H. Box. 

 INTRODUCTION 

I. THE SIBYLLINE TRADITION IN GREECE 
AND ROME. 

IN the Hellenic world, as in that of the Hebrews, the 
guidance and inspiration of prophecy was always sought 
and held in veneration. In the great days of Hellas the 
oracles played a part in the moulding of public policy 
no less than in the solution of private problems, and 
• long after those days had passed away the popular re 
ligion drew a constant stream of enquirers to the places 
where the counsel of God was thought to be revealed. 
Oracles such as that of Claros enjoyed an enormous 
vogue as late as the second century A.D.—never, 
indeed, had their popularity been greater : and it waned 
only with the decay of the cults which nurtured it. 

In the main, it is clear the Greeks believed firmly 
that the inspiration of their oracles and seers was genuine. 
It is true that Aristophanes laughed at them and parodied 
their utterances, and that Lucian in his day found abun 
dant material for satire in the charlatans who made large 
profit out of the superstitions of a nerve-ridden age, 
while Aristotlel treated inspiration as a form of melan 
choly ; yet the mind of Hellas was more truly repre 
sented by Plato 2 and Plutarch,3 both of whom spoke 

1 Ar. Probi. 30. ι. 

2 Plat. Pkœdr. 244 b. The Sibyl and others, like the oracles of 
Delphi and Dodona, μαντική χρωμιναι ίνβίφ ττολλα δ}) τολλοΐι 
irpo\4yovrfs els το μί\\ον Άρβωσαν. 

3 Plut, di Pyth. Or. 398 c, an interesting discussion, where a 

»*'-! H II iH!Hi;.«»H!HïHnJiiU .ïiUli!., «i.iUi-.ioîiif IE 

 8 INTRODUCTION 

of the oracles and the Sibyl with genuine religious 
respect. 

The oracles, strictly so called, were always consulted . 
through the official medium of the priests who had charge 
of them; but there were also less official sources of 
revelation ; voices to be heard in caverns where sub 
terranean springs gave forth mysterious sounds, or from 
the rush of the wind through trees ; in such places the 
earliest " Sibyls " had their home, and could be consulted 
by any who chose to approach them : or rather, through 
them the people could seek counsel of Apollo, to whom 
their inspirati"n was always ascribed. 

The Sibylline tradition, then, took its origin from 
a side-stream of oracular inspiration. According to 
Rohde (Psyche, vol. ii. pp. 62 f.) one must also infer that 
between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., when the 
enthusiastic cult of Dionysus was taking settled form, 
there were wandering prophets in Hellas, unattached to 
any local habitation ; men and women subject to ecstatic 
possession, gifted with second sight, who played a part 
analogous to that of the prophets of early Christian 
history. The Cassandra of the Agamemnon is just such 
a figure. She corresponds closely to the earliest de 
scription of a Sibyl, found in a fragment of Heraclitus ;1 
her utterance is wild, harsh and uncouth : her message 
is full of unwelcome truths and forebodings of disaster ; 
it is like that of Micaiah the son of Imlah, or that of 
the seer in the Iliad z to whom it was said αΐ« τοι τα 

sceptical interlocutor urges that if one foretells all possible disasters 
some of the predictions are sure of fulfilment, but against this it is 
maintained that the Sibyl is too accurate in respect of place and 
time to be disposed of in this way. 

1 In Plutarch, de Pyth. Or. 561. Slßu\\a Sì μαιναμ^νψ στάμα-ri, 
καθ' ' Hpaic\ftTov, αγίλαστα καΐ ακαλλώπ-ιστα ΚΛ\ αμύριστα 
χι\ίων irtav (£ι/θΈίτα< ττ} φωνή Sia ταν 9*αν. 

'' Homer, Iliad, i. Ιθ6. 

INTRODUCTION 9 

κοκ «m ψιλά ψρεσί μαντεύ€σθαι. It is with such sooth 
sayers, 2ί/3υλΛαι1 και Βάκιδες, and with casual utterances 
gradually collected and handed down in ever-increasing 
number, that the Sibylline tradition begins. 

The first of the Sibyls, according to the general belief, 
was one Herophile, described now as the daughter, 
sister or wife of Apollo, now as the child of a fisherman 
and a nymph ; she came from the Troad to Delphi before 
the Trojan war, "in \\rath with her brother Apollo," 
lingered for a time at Samos, visited Claros and Delos, 
and died in the Troad, after surviving nine generations of 
men. After her death she became a wandering voice 
which still brought to the ears of men tidings of the 
future wrapped in dark enigmas.2 

Two places claimed to be the birthplace of Herophile, 
namely Marpessos in the Troad and Erythrse. The 
Erythrseans based their claim on an alleged utterance 
of the Sibyl—πατρίς Sé μοί εστίν Ερυθρή—while the 

1 The traditional derivation of the word 2i/3uAAa is given by 
Varrò (ap. Lact, Inst. i. 6, 7) who refers it to the vEolic atas (0«cis) 
and /3ύλλα (ßou\ri) : "itaque Sibyllam dictam esse quasi βίοβούλην." 
Modern philologists regard this as improbable. Grappe (Grieck. 
Mythologie, p. 927) thinks the word Phoenician or Arabic in origin, 
and equivalent to "possessed by God." Nestle, (Beri. Philol. 
Wockmschr. 1904, pp. 764-6) advances with hesitation a conjectuie 
based upon a theory of Schürer's (Die Prophetin Isabel in Thyatira, 
in Tkeol. Abhandlungen Weizsacker gewidmet, pp. 39 K). In 
Thyatira there was a Ζαμβάθειον, a shrine of Sambethe the Chaldean 
Sibyl (C.I.G. 3509): Schürer suggests that the Jezebel or Isabel 
of Rev. ii. 20 was the local prophetess of this shrine, and Nestle 
proceeds to guess that Isabel and Sibyl are originally one and the 
same word. More scientific and less hazardous is the view of Dr. 
Postgate (American Journal of Philology, iii. 333 f.), who traces 
SifhAAo to a root aiß—(iß), akin to (nß-is, sap-iens, and seen 
in such proper names as Siau'pras, etc., and the diminutive termin 
ation—νλλα : it will thus mean " the wise little woman " ; cf. our 
wizard, from witan, and the Latin saga, praesagus, praesagium. 

1 In Plut, de Pyth. Ot. lac. cit. The tradition is mentioned that 
the Sibyl went to the moon and is still visible there, as a human 
face. 

\1: t Îliliï'l 

 IO 

INTRODUCTION 

Marpessians asserted that their rivals had suppressed 
a line of the true text, which ought to read thus :— 

πατρίς Sé μοί ίστα> ερυθρή 
Mópm/crcros, μητρός lepr/, ποταμός S" 'AïStui/euç. 

Marpessos proved to be too insignificant to uphold its 
claim, and thus the Erythraean Sibyl usurped and 
retained the first place in tradition as the earliest and 
greatest of all Sibyls. So, for instance, Lactantius says 
(de Ira Dei, 22, 4) that all ancient authorities "prseci- 
puam ac nobilem .praeter cèleras Erythrseam fuisse 
commémorant."1 

It is probable that Sibylline vaticination was practised 
in many localities ; by the time of Vai ro 2 ten Sibyls had 
been enumerated, and other authorities (see Alexandre, 
App. to Exc. I) give other lists and numbers : but the 
literary tradition of the Sibyl begins with only one. 
Heraclitus, Aristophanes, Plato and Plutarch refer to the 
Sibyl in the singular,3 and Tacitus (Ann. vi. 12) doubts 
whether the singular or the plural is the proper number 
to employ. 

It is clear from Aristophanes that some sort of Sibyl 
line literature was current in Greece in the fifth century 

1 Erylhrae continued to glory in its borrowed distinction down to 
a late period. Buresch has published (Mittheilungen des k.d. 
Archäal. Instituts, Athenische Abtheilung XVII.) a dedicatory in 
scription of the time of M. Aurelius, in which the Sibyl says irarpif 
S' ουκ. &\\η, μαυνίι Sf μοί ianv Ερυθροί, and rejoices that after 900 
years of wandering lue she is back again in her home, to see the 
fulfilment of her prophecy that Erythrœ would once more flourish. 

1 Varrò ap. Lact. Inst. i. 6, 7-12. Varro's ten Sibyls are— 
the Persian, Libyan, Delphic, Cimmerian, Erythriean, Samian, 
Cumaean, Hellespontian, Phrygian and Tiburtine. 

a So does Pausanias as a rule, though in X. xii. he enumerates 
four Sibyls, one without a name (? the Libyan), Herophile, the 
Cumsean, and the Jewish. But he may be dependent on some 
other source at this point : see Frazer's note ad lac. 

INTRODUCTION 

II 

B.c.1 But the Roman portion of the Sibylline story 
takes the literature back to a considerably earlier date. 
It was at the end of the sixth century B.C. that one of 
theTarquins, probably TarquiniusSuperbus, "canonized" 
such Sibylline oracles as he was wise enough to purchase, 
and had them laid up in the Capitol. ' Nine books, it is 
I said,2 were offered to Tiim by an old woman from 
ι Cumse, at the price of 300 gold pieces ; at the end of 
the bargaining the vendor had burnt six out of the nine, 
and was able to secure the original price in full for the 
remaining three. Now these books were brought indeed 
from Cumse, where there was (in later times, at any 
rate) a Sibylline cave and oracle ; but they were not 
of Cumsran origin : Cumse, tradition says, produced no 
written oracles. The "Cumseum carmen" was in fact 
simply the " Erythraean " collection, /. e. all that was 
believed in the sixth century to be the work of the chief 
and original Sibyl. \ 

*~ The installation of the Sibyllines on the Capitol was 
an event of first-rate importance in the religious history 
of Rome. It was the work of the first Roman ruler who 
solemnly consulted the Delphic oracle, and it proved to 
be, if not the beginning and sole cause, at least an early 
and potent factor in the Hellenizing of Roman religion.3 
New deities, new forms of old deities, new cults, new 
methods of propitiation, new festivals and observances 
were introduced on the authority of the sacred canon 
thus imported. A college of officials, Duumvirs at first, 
Quindecimvirs later, was appointed to have charge of 
the documents, and two assistants at least were always 

He refers to it with mingled sarcasm and respect. σι/3υλλι5ΐ', 
like βακίζΐΐν, means ' ' to talk oracular nonsense." 

2 Dion. Hal. iv. 62. 

3 Marquardt and Mommsen, Staatsaltertuiner, vi. 336 ff. 

 12 

INTRODUCTION 

provided who had a knowledge of Greek.1 The oracles, 
it would seem, were constantly studied, but were never 
"consulted" or "approached" except by express order of 
the State. Their use appears to have been twofold: 
they were consulted in times of danger, for predictions 
and warnings,2 and on the occurrence of unprecedented 
portents or disasters, for the discovery of appropriate 
rituals of propitiation. 

The existing Sibylline books, having passed through 
the hands of Jewish and Christian editors, naturally 
retain no traces of such ritual injunctions as it was the 
business of the Quindecimvirs to discover.3 Indeed it 
appears that even in the Roman books the expected 
answers were by no means found lying on the surface. 
The method of consultation was elaborate and artificial. 
One account of it avers that a line was chosen at 
random, and an acrostic was made, with the letters 
composing this line as the "lights": verses beginning 
with the appropriate letters were then discovered in the 
oracles and perhaps composed for the occasion. If this 
account is even approximately correct,4 it is clear that 

1 The Sibyllines were not the only books under their charge. 
Together with them the libri fatales of Veii, the utterances of 
Begoe the Etruscan prophetess, the " sortes " of Albunea of Tibur, 
and (after 213 B.C.) the carmina Afarciatta formed the collection 
known as the libriJatales. 

2 Cf. Cicero, dcDiv. i. 43, 98 et in Sibyllinis libris eœdem repertae 
praadictiones sunt ; Livy iii. IO, 7 libri. . . aditi : pericula a conuentu 
alienigenarum pnedicta . . . inter ceteia moiiitum ut seditionibus 
abstinerelur. 

3 Hence Augustine was able to say (do Civ. Dei, xvin. xxiii.) that 
the Sibyl "nihil habet in totu carmine suo . . . quod ad deorum 
falsorum sive fictorum cultum pertineat, quin immo . . . etiam 
contra eos et contra cultores corum loquitur." 

* This is based on Alexandra's interpretation (Exc. III. xvi. 
p. 232) of Cic. de Dio. ii. 54 ; on the other hand, Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus (iv. 62), writing about 30 B.C., says that the oracles 
had already suffered from interpolations and that the interpolations 

INTRODUCTION 13 

the Quindecimvirs were in a fortunate position. The 
Sibyl was venerated, and she could be made to say what 
they thought desirable. However, it is probable that a 
certain amount of ritual prescription was actually found 
in the text of the books. The god or goddess connected 
with a particular calamity would often be named, and in 
such cases it would be easy to find precedents to direct 
the Quindecimvirs towards the appropriate ceremony : 
moreover, Aristophanes certainly found ritual injunctions 
and political warnings in his text of the Sibyl, for these 
are the things that he parodies : his Sibyl declares when 
peace should and should not be made, and when it is 
proper to sacrifice a white ram to Pandora.1 

J ι Si B.C. the buildings on the Capitol, with their 
contents, were destroyed by fire ; but so great was the 
importance attached to the sacred deposit of the libri 
fatales that five years after the fire a commission was 
sent out to renew the collection. The commissioners 
made enquiry for Sibylline verses in Italy and abroad, 
especially at Erythrae,2 and were able_lo_bring together 
_about looo lines as the genuine words of the Sibyl. 

Thus from 76 B.C. onwards the Roman collection con 
sisted of lines which had been found to be in general 
circulation ; some of them were taken from public col 
lections, and some copied down from popular oral tradi 
tion.3 No doubt many of these were accepted as having 

could be detected "by means of the so-called acrostics," which 
may mean that an acrostical oracle was likely to be spurious. Yet it 
may mean exactly the reverse of this ; the Christian author of Book 
viii. inserted (217-250) an acrostic—of which the initial letters are 
IH2OT2 XPEISTOS OEOÏ TIO5 STATPO2, and one does not see 
why he should have chosen to do this unless the acrostical form 
was commonly a mark of genuineness. 

1 Aristophanes, Peace, 1074 fi. ; Birds, 967 ff. 

2 Dion. Hal. iv. 62 ; Tac. Ann. vi. 12. 
1 imp' ανδρών ιδιωτών, Dion. Hal. lac. cit. 

 14 INTRODUCTION 

had a place in the books destroyed by the fire; but 
there is reason to think that on the one hand the work 
of the commission stimulated both the production of 
new and the adaptation of old Sibylline matter, and that 
on the other the Quindecimvirs had to sift out a con 
siderable mass of spurious oracles ;1 for, as will be seen, 
more than one collection was by this time in existence 
which owed its origin to propagandist literary efforts, 
Jewish and Pagan. 

Further efforts were made both by Augustus and by 
Tiberius to secure the purity and the authority of the 
Sibylline canon. During the arrangements for the cele 
bration of the Ludi Saeculares i i il B.C. Augustus had 
the oracles re copied ;2 and on assuming the dignity of 
Pontifex Maximus five years later he caused a large mass 
of spurious or unauthorized oracles to be burnt, retaining 
only those of the Sibyl : these he placed in gilded cases 
in the temple of Apollo on the Palatine.3 Tiberius, 
disturbed by a popular prophecy of the approaching end 
of the empire, set on foot a similar critical enquiry, which 
resulted apparently in some enlargement of the official 
collection as well as in the destruction of some spurious 
or worthless matter.4 

It is needless to follow further the story of the Roman 
Sibylline canon,5 nor indeed is it directly connected with 

1 Tac. Ann. vi. 12, dato . . . sacerdotibus negotio quantum 
humana ope potuissent vera discernere. 

1 Dio Cass. liv. 17. a Suet. Aug. 31. 

' Dio Cass. Ivii. 18, καΐ TÌL βιβ\1α πάντα τα μαντίίαν τίνα 
Έχοντα infffKf^iaTOj ΚΛΪ τα μεν as ouSevòs &ξια απέκρινί, τα Sf 
Ìvifcpive. 

5 The books were not often consulted under the empire. As 
one would expect, they were not left undisturbed by Julian ; 
Symmachus, as befitted a patrician deeply loyal to the old religion, 
held the office of Quindecimvir in 377 A.D. ; but in the reign of 
Honorius, at the end of the fourth century, the books were burnt 
by order of Stilicho. 

INTRODUCTION 15 

that of the Jewish-Christian books. But its indirect in 
fluence was considerable. The official adoption of the 
Sibyl by Rome herself, and the atmosphere of awe and 
secrecy with which her oracles were surrounded, lent to 
her name and words a prestige which it would be 
difficult to over-estimate; Rome completed and sealed 
with imperial authority the process of canonization which 
had begun in the folk-lore of Hellas. Hence came, in 
large measure, the temptation to utilize for purposes of 
propaganda a name so venerable. Since the Sibyl was 
a prophetess, any prophecy could safely be ascribed to 
her without fear of disproof; since she was so eminent 
and so ancient, any prophecy which could gain currency 
under her name was sure of eager and widespread 
acceptance. 

It should be added also that the Roman tradition 
enriched the world with one poem which has had a 
higher and more enduring influence upon literary history 
than all the Sibylline verses taken together—the Fourth 
Eclogue of Vergil ;1 it was that prophecy of a new age 
and a blessed birth, inspired partly by the earlier Jewish 
Sibyllines (/'. A by part of our Book III.), partly also, it 
may be, by direct acquaintance with the Book of Isaiah, 
which won for Vergil his place in Christian thought as 
a herald of the Incarnation. 

II. THE JEWISH-CHRISTIAN ORACLES. 
A. The Extant Books. 

THE Oracula Sibyllina now extant consist of twelve 
books, numbered I.-VIII. and XI.-XÌV. This numera- 

1 See VergiFs Messianic Eclogue, by Conway, Warde Fowler 
and Mayor; also Sir W. M. Ramsay in Tkt Bearing of Recent 
Research on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, pp. 319- 
35°. 

ir <: i ι»;.ίΐΜϊίΙΛΙΐΓ· .i. 

 ιό 

INTRODUCTION 

tion, however, does not represent the contents or order 
of any actual MS., but is the result of a fusion of three 
types of text, and is adopted merely for convenience' 
sake, (i) In 1545 Sixtus Birken (Betuleius) published 
Books I.-VIII. 485 from a MS. (P) then at Augsburg, 
now at Munich. (2) In 1599 there appeared (post 
humously) an edition by Johannes Koch (Op'sopoeus), 
based on a Paris MS. (R), which contained the whole 
of Book VIII., but placed it at the beginning of the 
collection. (3) In 1817 and 1828 Angelo Mai was able 
to add, from one MS. at Milan and two in the Vatican 
(a) Book XIV., with VI.-VII. ι and VIII. 218-428, 
and (o) Books XI.-XIV., with IV., VI.-VII. i, VIII. 
218-428 (numbered together as Book IX.), and VIII. 
1-9 (numbered as Book XV.) ; the text of IV., VI., 
and VIII. representing a different recension from those 
previously published. 

The present editions number the first eight books as 
they stood in the editto princess, and XI.-XIV. as in 
the MSS. discovered by Mai. But (2) and (3) differ 
considerably in order from (i). (i) begins with a pro 
logue, towards the end of which comes the note βιβ\ίον 
α πΐρΐ του άναρχου οίου ; our Books I. and II. follow as 
λόγο« πρώτος. (2) has III. as λόγος ffpuros, I. and II. 
as Sevrepos, III. as rpiTos (or TeropTos) IV. as Teropros (or 
Te/iirroc); while in (3) IV.-VII. i, VIII. 218-428 appear 
together as Book IX., and VIII. 1-9 as a fragment of 
Book XV. That is to say, the compiler of (3) aimed at 
completeness and achieved disorder; his Book IX. is 
a masterpiece of confusion. He made a collection of 
fifteen books—it may be that he had fifteen Sibyls in 
mind as their authors—and fortunately used a relatively 
good type of text.1 He preserves to us four books the 

1 The textual problems of Or. Sii. will not be discussed here. 

INTRODUCTION 17 

interest of which is largely political : XL, Christian 
book based on V. 1-51 and somewhat later in date than 
226 A.D. ;l XII., a Jewish writing of the time of Alex 
ander Severus, edited by a Christian hand ; XIII., a 
Christian book earlier than 265 A.D., and XIV., also 
Christian but not earlier than the fourth century. 

Books I.-VIII. contain all the earlier matter, and 
nearly all that is of specifically religious interest. III.-V., 
the earliest of all, must be described later in some detail. 
VI. and VII. are both probably of the second century 
A.D., and are interesting documents tinged with heresy. 
VIII., which contains the famous acrostic, and was used 
by Commodian and Lactantius, comes from the bitter 
time of persecution about 180 A.D. or earlier. I. and II. 
are Jewish, with Christian interpolations, some of them 
from Book VIII. ; the Jewish basis being possibly as 
late as the third century A.D. 

The patristic quotations coincide quite clearly with 
the internal evidence of the text as to the general 
questions of date. Down to Clement of Alexandria the 
certain quotations are limited to III., IV. and V., with 
one or two possible allusions to VIIL, and frequent use 
of two fragments, which appear in Theophilus of Antioch 
as the " proœmium " of the Sibyl, and probably stood at 
one time at the beginning of III. Commodian confines 
himself mainly to VII., and Lactantius makes full and 

It will be enough to say that there are three types of text corre 
sponding to the three collections described above. (3), The text 
of Mai's discoveiies is usually indicated by the letter Ω, and is 

uperior to Φ, the text of type (i), and to V, that of type (2), where 
it can be compared with them. Φ tends to give belter readings 
than Ψ, but the state of the text as a whole compels the critic to 
live from hand to mouth ; no general piinciples can be applied to 
such a mass of error and corruption. 
1 These datings are taken without prejudice from Geffckeu, 

T.U. pp. 31 ff. 
Β 

, Η·'·1 V! H ilütliiHWW'tfititjl, .il! i' "'i.·'.»'·.·.·.-.,,· 

 ι8 

INTRODUCTION 

copious use of the Books' III.—VIII., with the procemium 
of Theophilus and one or two fragments. 

B. Origin of Hie Jewish Collection. 

In the third and second century B.C. the Judaism of the 
Dispersion found itself in close and manifold contact with 
Hellenism. To the Alexandrian Jew the Hellenic world 
was both a friend and an enemy. He was attracted, in 
fluenced, enriched by its wisdom, its poetry, its history : 
he was challenged and repelled by its religion and (apart 
from the kindred influence of Stoicism) by its morals. 
The problem then arose how a Greek-speaking Jew could 
best maintain his place in two worlds so strangely diverse 
as those of Zion and Hellas : how he could commend his 
own faith and practice to the Greeks whose intellectual 
life he shared, and uphold their authority and prestige 
over against the cults and traditions of Hellas. In 
answer to these problems there came into being a con 
siderable literature in which the names of Greek authors 
were used with a freedom which would now be considered 
less than honest. The works or fragments so produced 
had one of two motives always, and sometimes both : the 
propagation of the Jewish faith and the enhancing of the 
credit and status of Judaism. History was represented 
by a pseudo-Hecatseus, poetry by spurious verses attri 
buted to Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, 
Philemon, Menander. Orpheus was made to recant his 
polytheism and proclaim the one true God : Sophocles 
to foretell the end of the world by fire and the future 
blessedness of the righteous. All this was merely a 
forcible entry upon the heritage of the Hellenes ; the 
major premiss underlying it was the genuine conviction 
that the creed of revelation was in fact older and truer 
than the wisdom and worship of the Greek. The Jewish 

INTRODUCTION 19 

"forgers" doubtless felt themselves to be merely re 
writing Greek literature as it ought to have been 
written. 

The fashion of pseudonymous propaganda having 
once been set, it would have been astonishing if the 
Jews had failed to utilize and appropriate the Sibyl. In 
the age of the Maccabees, if a book of " Daniel " was 
needed to confirm the faith and hope of the saints, a 
book of the Sibyl was almost postulated as a necessity to 
vindicate that hope among the unbelieving. The motive 
for producing it was overwhelming. Other Greek teachers 
had already appeared, and found acceptance, in a Jewish 
garb ; here was the oldest of Greek prophets, venerated 
throughout the Graeco-Roman world : her prophecies 
existed in no fixed form or dimension ; the tone and key 
of her utterances was closely akin to that of Hebrew 
prophecy, and especially to that of the more recent 
prophets, with their insistence on a catastrophic vindica 
tion of God ; she spoke of the downfall of cities and 
empires, of blood and disaster. It was well worth while 
to enlist such an ally on the right side. 

Further, it must be remembered that the Jews were 
not the first to utilize the Sibyl in this way. One may 
doubt whether the Erythraean Sibyl herself, with her 
claim to be older than Homer,1 and to have supplied the 
material from which he plagiarized the Ι/iadanà. Odyssey, 
was entirely above suspicion. And the Babylonian Sibyl, 
Sabbe or Sambethe, on whose work part of our Book III. 
is based, was certainly a creature of literary artifice.3 Her 
author (who came to be known as her father) was 

1 Cf. Or. Sii. III. 420 ff. 

1 She came, however, to have a local habitation : outside Thya- 
tira there was a ~2αμβάβ(ΐον tv τφ Χαλδαίου π(ριβί\φ, C. I. G. 3509 : 
see Ramsay in Hastings' D.B. art. Thyatira. 

 20 INTRODUCTION 

Berosus, a priest of Bel ; he desired (exactly like any 
Alexandrian Jew) to show that his own people and 
religion were far superior in antiquity and authority to 
Greece and her gods. A contemporary of Euhemerus 
(at the end of the fourth century B.c.), he welcomed the 
theory which treated the gods of Olympus as deified 
mortals, and incorporated this, together with Babylonian 
traditions of the beginning of things, in the book of the 
" Babylonian Sibyl." It is probable also that he either 
wrote or borrowed a considerable mass of prophetic 
narrative relating to (and hostile to) Alexander the 
Great. 

Conceive, then, an Alexandrian Jew, about 160 B.C., 
in whose hands is a work already accepted as Sibylline, 
but containing—in a pagan form, of course—the stories 
of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, together with a 
rationalistic handling of Greek religion. What Berosus 
had begun, the Jew could not fail to continue. A few 
touches only were needed to expunge (he polytheism of 
the Berosian stories : the rest could be incorporated 
en bloc. 

This, it would seem, was actually the way in which 
Book III., the earliest of the Jewish Sibyllines, began to 
take shape. The elements composing it (as it now 
stands) are as follows :—(i) matter from the Babylonian 
Sibyl and the Alexander-story (? = the Persian Sibyl) ; 
(2) Hellenic oracles of various dates from the Erythrœan 
collection; (3) Jewish oracles from the time of the 
Maccabees onwards ; (4) Christian additions and altera 
tions. All these diverse materials are strung together 
without any recognizable plan or sequence. Those who 
compiled, enlarged, and edited the collection felt, doubt 
less, that the spirit of the Sibylline tradition could best 
be maintained by avoiding all semblance of method; 

INTRODUCTION 

21 

the character which the Sibyl had to maintain was that 
of a frenzied seer, and not that of a literary artist.1 

Books IV. and V. are less confused and confusing than 
Book III. They contain a certain amount of ancient 
and miscellaneous matter, and some late additions ; but 
the substance of them belongs in the main to one short 
period, the latter part of the first century A.D., and there 
fore, although they exhibit no kind of sequence, they 
are easier to understand than the wildly heterogeneous 
collection which precedes them. 

I have attempted to supply a conjectural indication of 
date for each section ; but the reader should be warned 
that no two editors will be found to be in entire agree 
ment as to dates or sources. References to the works 
named in the bibliography will enable him to correct or 
verify the tentative conclusions at which I have arrived. 

C.—BOOKS III. IV. AND V.; ANALYSIS AND 
PROBABLE DATES. 

(i) Book III. 

In Book III. 1-45 is Jewish, Egyptian, and of un 
certain date. A similar but more elaborate proclamation 
of monotheism is found in Theophilus of Antioch (II. 
36)—the editors print it as fragments I.-IIL—and said 
by him to have stood ίν άρχί} r>}s προφητΐίας. Lac- 
tantius quotes this as " Erythraean " : and with him 
"Sibylla Erythraea" means Book .III. Blass (in 
Kautzsch, Apokr. und Pseudepigr. des a. T.'s, vol. ii.) cuts 

1 This may be illustrated from the sixth-century Prologue to the 
Oracles (86 ff.), where it is said that the crudilies and obscurity of 
the verse are due to the shorthand-wiiters who took down the 
oracles as they were uttered, but were too clumsy to keep up with 
the Sibyl's dictation, or too ignorant to understand it. 

«πι » ρ:,, ι 

KiHîHi:-mïi!H»iÎHrtU 

 22 

INTRODUCTION 

out 1-45 and substitutes the proxmium of Theophilus ; I 
agree that this would represent the text as Lactantius 
found it, but think that our 1-45 represents an earlier 
form, for which the more sophisticated lines of the 
proiemium were substituted some time in the second 
century A.D. 

46-62 is Jewish, and not earlier, I think, than 30 B.C. : 
possibly 53 if. may be an addition as late as 79 A.D. 

In 63-92 and 93-96 we have probably a Christian 
hand of the latter part of the first century, A.D. 

97-154 is from the Babylonian Sibyl. Passages from 
the same source dealing with the Deluge will be found 
in I. 230-256. 

156-210 is confused: but it contains, among other 
matter, a clear Jewish oracle on Rome from the time of 
Antiochus Epiphanes, with later touches; from 211-294, 
however, we have a fairly continuous account of the 
Jews and their fortunes to the end of the exile, dating 
from the later Maccabean period. 

The Jewish oracles on Babylon, Egypt, Gog and 
Magog, and Libya in 295-333 can hardly be dated, but 
334-336 appears to refer to the "Julium sidus" of 44 B.C., 
and there are reasons for assigning a late date to 319-333. 

337-349 is a patch of Hellenic oracles ; 350-355, a 
Greek oracle from Asia Minor, belongs to the period of 
the Mithridatic wars. 

356-362 and 363-380 are Jewish oracles against Rome, 
and can only be dated by conjecture. They may belong 
to the time of Pompey, 63 B.C., and it is just possible 
that in 372 there is a Christian touch. 

381-387 comes from the Alexander-oracles, and the 
view adopted here of the difficult lines 388-400 is that 
this is a passage from the same source, recast to suit the 
time of Antiochus Epiphanes. 

INTRODUCTION 23 

401-432 is Erythraean, and 433-488 is Hellenic and 
ancient for the most part, but 444-448 may come from 
the Mithridatic period, while 464-473 deals with the 
Social War and Sulla. 

With 492-503 we revert to the Maccabasan stratum. 
In 504-519 the only indication of date (508 if.) takes us 
to the second century B.C. ; and for 520-572, oracles 
against Hellas, we have a choice between the Roman 
conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. and the miserable epoch 
of Sulla's campaigns, 551-553 suggesting perhaps the 
earlier date. 

573-651 dates itself as not earlier than the time of the 
seventh Ptolemy, i. e. the middle of the second century, 
B.C. ; and the remainder of the book has been assigned 
to a similar date. 

But I am not without misgivings as to many parts of 
the last 300 lines. It is doubtful whether they stood in 
their present shape in the text of Lactantius. He is 
always careful, in quoting Book III., to refer to it as 
"Sibylla Erythrœa"; but III. 545 and 547 if. are cited 
by him without specifying the Erythraean Sibyl (Inst. i. 
15,15) and 652-3 are definitely assigned to " alia Sibylla," 
z'. e. to some other book than the third (hist. vii. 18, 7). 
Combining this fact with the close resemblances which 
are found between the eschatology of this section and 
that of Book V., I am inclined to think that in any case 
this part of the book was remodelled in the middle of 
the first century A.D. A Christian hand appears in 
776. 

The book closes, Sog-end, with a brief but involved 
epilogue, in which the Sibyl identifies herself with the 
Babylonian and the alleged Erythraean, and claims to be 
the daughter-in-law of Noah. 

ιΓ 

 24 INTRODUCTION 

(2) Book IV. 

It is a relief, after the intricate disorder of Book III., 
to turn to the comparative unity and simplicity of Book 
IV., which dates as a whole from a time not long after 
the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. That disaster is 
clearly described (130-136), as is also the earthquake at 
Laodicea in 76 A.D. (107-8), while the legend of Nero's 
disappearance and expected return has already taken 
shape (76-79, 117-124, 137-139). An atmosphere of 
distress and gloom pervades the book, with expectations 
of judgement. It is pessimistic even with regard to 
the " godly " : yet it looks forward to a better age on 
this earth when the doom has been wrought out. Zahn 
believes the writer to have been an Asiatic Jew domiciled 
in Italy; but there is about as much reason (72-75) for 
placing him in Egypt. 

The book opens with a prologue (1-23), and a procla 
mation of the righteousness of Judaism and the coming 
doom of its enemies (24-48). 49-114 gives a broken 
sketch of world-history from Assyria to Hellas, Mace 
donia and Rome, interrupted by a reference to Nero 
(76-79), and containing some miscellaneous Hellenic 
oracles ranging in date from an ancient oracle already 
found in Strabo (97-8) to 76 A.D. (107-8). 115-139 
deals with Rome and the Jews, the eruption of Vesuvius, 
and Nero's expected return. 140-151 are Hellenic 
oracles, of which 149-151 may be as late as 76 A.D. 

From 152 to the end of the book we have a prophecy 
of moral collapse, judgement, destruction, resurrection 
and restoration. 

(3) Book V. 

The whole spirit and tone of Book V. stands in strong 
contrast with that of IV. IV. is serious, melancholy and 

* INTRODUCTION 25 

quiet : V. is passionate and visionary, alike in its hatred 
of Rome, in its pictures of vengeance and restoration, and 
in its treatment of the mythical figure of the returning 
Nero. V. even abandons the tense and form of 
prophecy, so vivid are its visions, and speaks both of 
the ruin of Jerusalem and of the coming of the Restorer 
as already accomplished (398, 408, 414). 

The dating and analysis of the book have given rise 
to considerable divergences of opinion. We may here be 
content to take Zahnl and Geffcken as representing the 
chief divergence, the former holding that three different 
hands are traceable throughout the book,2 the latter, 
whose main conclusions I have adopted, regarding it (with 
the exception of 1-51) as a unity. The evidence of 
language, metre and mood appears to me to lend 
adequate support to Geffcken's view. 

In 1—51, then, we have a sketch of the emperors down 
to M. Aurelius, from a Jewish hand. It is strangely 
favourable to Hadrian, but I see no reason for regarding 
51 as an interpolation, and am therefore unable to accept 
Zahn's view that 1-49 stand apart as the work of a Jew in 
the early part of Hadrian's reign, when the Jews are said 
to have hoped that Hadrian would restore the temple. 

After 51, if we subtract the Christian touches and the 
relics of Hellenic prophecy embedded in the book, the 
rest will be found to express one mood, one indignation 
and one hope. To a Christian source we may without 
hesitation refer 256-259: possibly also 62-71, and also, 

1 InZeitschr. für kitchliclie Wissenschaft, vol. vii. 1886, pp. 37 ff. 

* Zahn discerns in V. the work of—A, a Jew of about 74 A.D. ; 
B, a second Jew, less fierce than A, of the time of Hadrian ; and C, a 
Christian interpolator and redactor. His analysis is as follows :—A, 
111-178, 200-205, 228-246, 361-433, 484-531 ; B, 1-49", 5°b. 52- 
iio, 179-199. 206-227, 247-360, 434-483; C, 49% 50b, 51, 257, 
413, and perhaps other lines. 

 26 INTRODUCTION 

I am inclined to think, 228-24Ó.1 Hellenic are lines 
115-136 : 186-7 are also clearly ancient : Hellenic sources 
may underlie 287-327, though a Jewish hand is also 
traceable, 333-5 and 336-7 are also from an old tradition ; 
464 if. goes back to the inroad of the Gauls into Asia and 
Greece in 280 B.C. 

That the Jew who wrote the rest of the book was 
an Egyptian is unmistakably clear. In 52-92 we have 
prophecies of ruin on Memphis and other Egyptian 
cities: in 179-199 a group of oracles on Egypt and Gyrene : 
a word against Egyptian paganism in 279 f., an Egyptian 
prophecy in 458-463, and from 484-511 an idealistic 
picture of the downfall of Serapis, the conversion of his 
servants to the true God, and the erection of a true 
temple in Egypt. Thus the whole texture of the book 
is interwoven with Egyptian threads. 

Its main themes are simple : lamentation over the 
destroyed temple, burning indignation against " Babylon," 
the city of evil-doers, thirst for vengeance ; visions of the 
end, with its woes and its conflict with the forces of Nero- 
Antichrist ; the rebuilding of the temple and the restor 
ation of God's people to their proper and promised 
blessedness. 

The book was written (apart from 1-51) after the 
death of Titus (411-413) but at a time when the legend 
of his sudden extinction had already found acceptance ; 
and it exhibits the Nero-legend in a developed form, 
with wilder features than those found in Book" IV. 
These indications give no ground for precise calculation; 
nor do I believe that any safe deduction can be drawn from 
the allusions to the Parthians in 93 if., 439 ff. ; " Parthia " 
in this book has already lost touch with history and taken 

1 I am in accord here with Geffcken, though I do not accept his 
treatment of the apostrophe to 5@pis : see note ad lai. 

INTRODUCTION 37 

on the character of the mythical enemy of the people of 
God. One would however, be on safe ground in assigning 
the book to the last quarter of the first century A.D., and 
in classing it with the Apocalypse of Baruch and II. (IV.) 
JSsdras : it is inspired by the same tragic passion as the 
latter, though falling far below it in nobility of thought 
and utterance. 

III. DOCTRINE AND ESCHATOLOGY OF III.-V. 

(a) THE two and a half centuries which elapsed while 

the earliest Jewish Sibyllines were taking their present , 

shape saw many and various developments in the sphere of 

eschatological teaching : hence it is possible to illustrate 

Bks. III.-V. on this side from Jewish literature, and 

especially from apocalyptic literature, of every date, but 

it is not possible to put together a coherent account of 

the Sibylline eschatological teaching; so it must suffice 

to indicate the main themes which occupy the writers of 

the various parts. On the other hand, these centuries 

saw little radical change in the main elements of primitive 

doctrine. " The belief in the one invisible spiritual God, 

who, Himself uncreated, has called out from himself 

this visible creaturely woild, is the supreme essential in 

the mission preaching of Hellenistic Judaism."1 This 

is also the chief dogmatic burden of the Sibyllines. 

They return again and again to the proclamation of 

monotheism and the denunciation of idolatry (III. 7-35, 

545 if., 586 if., 604 ff., 629; IV. 6-17, 24-39; V. 75 ff., 

276 if, 353ff., 403ff). 

The transcendent God whom they preach is ineffable 
as well as invisible (III. 18-19), and the Sibyllines 
illustrate the prevailing tendency of Hellenistic Judaism 
1 Bousset, R.J., 296. 

,»[if:i. 

 28 

INTRODUCTION 

to substitute periphrases and synonyms for the Divine 
Name.1 Over against the moral defilements of heathen 
ism, and its sexual laxity in particular (III. 36-45, 184 if., 
762 ff. ; IV. 25-39 ; V. 386 ff., 429 ff.), is set in contrast 
the purity, kindness and brotherliness of the Jewish way 
of life (III. 219-247, 591-600). Here and there is seen 
a trace of the influence of Stoicism (e.g. communism the 
law of nature, III. 247 ; «oti/os νομοί, III. 757), which 
also supplied some of the imagery connected with the 
catastrophic end of the world.2 

These Jewish prophets, so intense in their hatred of 
paganism, are not all without hope for the pagan world. 
They call Hellas to repentance (III. 545-561), though 
sure that repentance will not come till doom has been 
inflicted (570 ff.): they appeal to heathendom, though 
sure that the appeal will not be heard (IV. 162-178). 
Yet they have visions of the conversion of the world : of 
a time when the one true temple will draw the peoples to 
join its worship and its praises (III. 616 ff.), and when the 
linen-clad priests of Serapis will bring oblations to 
Jehovah in a new Egyptian temple (V. 492-506). 

(6) The eschatology of IV. and V. is relatively simple, 
since the books supply clear internal evidence of their 
date; and the references in the notes will perhaps 
suffice to show how closely they are related to the other 
apocalyptic literature, Jewish and Christian, of the latter 
part of the first century A.D. 'In Book IV. the great 
sign of the end is the eruption of Vesuvius, with the 
destruction of the temple, the decay of godliness (117, 
152), and the disappearance and expected return of 

1 Cf. Boussei, R. J., pp. 305 ff. 

2 Especially ihe idea of a world conflagration, which the Stoics 
held, would consume all things and prepare for a recurrence of the 
whole of history. See, e.g., V. 512, note. 

ί.ί.-.Ι',', ',.ί 

INTRODUCTION 

29 

Nero. At the end there is to be a great and universal 
conflagration (152-161) ; after this a resurrection of the 
body (179 ff.) and a general judgement. Those whom 
the judge condemns will go into gloom -beneath the 
earth (43, 184-6), while the righteous will live on earth 
again in blessedness. 

Book V. is more vivid than IV. but not dissimilar to 
it. One point of difference is that in V. the Messianic 
King, absent from IV., reappears (105 ff., 414 ff.) : he is 
to come from the heavens, to destroy the enemies of 
God's Kingdom, to restore what the adversaries have 
pillaged, and to set up the new and perfect temple on 
earth. The sphere of his rule is to be terrestrial. But 
before he comes the woes of the last days have to be 
endured : first, the wars of the great adversaries of the 
Messiah, the Parthians1 and their king (ιοί ff.), which 
will end in glory and peace for the Jews (247-255) ; 
then the conflagration, with tumult and war among 
the heavenly bodies (206 ff., 512 ff). Parallel and 
presumably identical in essence with these pictures, are 
those connected definitely with Babylon-Rome. Babylon 
is to be burnt—a great star will be the sign—together 
with Italy and the sea, and then Rome_is to be judged 
(155-160). A world-wide war is to bring the return of 
Nero-Antichrist, who will reign in power and earthly 
wisdom (220 ff., 361 ff.) ; but portents and devastations 
sent from heaven (298-305, 377 ff.) will set an end to his 
rule and usher in the reign of peace, which will be a 
period of fruitfulness and plenty for the righteous upon 
this earth (281-5), where the new temple is to be built 
in glory (422-7). 

In Book III., however, the dating is all conjectural, 

1 In some passages the Ethiopians take the place of the 
Parlhians (205 ff., 504 ff., see note on III. 319). 

 30 INTRODUCTION 

and the dates of the earliest and the latest Jewish matter 
are separated by more than two centuries. An attempt 
has been made in the notes to indicate which books of 
the Apocalyptic literature supply the closest parallels to 
each passage; but I have not presumed, for the most 
part, to treat the eschatological data as affording precise 
evidence of date. 

Here as in the other books we have the signs of the 
end, the woes and wars of the end, the enemies of the 
Kingdom, the Antichrist, the Messianic King, the judge 
ment, the great conflagration, and the new age ; while 
the Hellenic oracles of destruction appear to be scat 
tered broadcast as emphasizing the general predictions 
of coming doom. Among the signs may be mentioned 
the great comet (333 ff.), the visions of fiery swords in 
heaven (673 ff.) and of warring hosts in the sky (796 ff.). 
There is to be a universal war (632 ff.), an uprising of 
Gog and Magog (319 ff.), a time of dearth (539 ff., 647 ff.), 
and after the great fire (Soff., 54ff., 543, 690), or the 
destruction of Babylon (303 ff.), the new age will come : a 
time of peace and plenty on this earth (in one passage 
(658 ff.) this golden age appears to be doubled—it comes 
both before and after the Judgement). The heathen will be 
converted (702 ff.) and the wicked burnt up (741 ff.). It 
will be the work of the Messianic King (46 ff., 95, 286 ff., 
652 ff.) to judge the world and execute sentence, to 
make a perpetual end to war (653), to restore the temple 
to its full splendour (657 ff., 288) and to reign among 
men for ever (49 f.). 

When the eschatological passages of Book III. are 
compared as a whole, and even line by line, with 
those of IV. and V., they convey the impression of 
lateness. It is true that the author of V. may have 
borrowed freely from III., yet it seems to me that in 

INTRODUCTION ' 31 

many passages of III. a situation similar to that of V. 
is presupposed. The king of Book III., like that of V., 
is to restore the temple; desecration of the temple is 
imminent in III. 660 ff. ; the enemies of God are to be 
judged for attacking the temple in III. 687. It may be 
urged that all this, or much of it, might have been 
written in the Maccabsean times, or even in those of 
Pompey. Yet when the passages are taken in the mass 
they do not suggest those epochs. It looks, indeed, as if 
the oracles had been often worked over. Thus we have 
in III. 248-285 a history of Israel from the Exodus to 
the Exile ; then, in 286, comes a reference to the restora 
tion ; yet the restorer is not, Cyrus, but the Messiah, King 
and Judge. In 301 we return to Babylon—but this 
time it is of Babylon-Rome, and not of the historical 
Babylon, that the Sibyl speaks. This is a fairly clear 
case of the re-modelling of an early passage to suit the 
circumstances and hopes of a later period.1 And if 
beneath the main eschatological passages of Book III. 
there lies an early substratum, I am inclined to think 
that it was carefully worked over in the middle of the 
first century A.D. 

IV.—THE SIBYLLINES IN EARLY CHRISTIAN 
LITERATURE. 

As we have seen, it was the Jews of Alexandria who 
were the first after Berosus to adopt, adapt and amplify the 
Sibylline oracles for the purpose of their own religion. 
From about 160 B.C. to the end of the ist century A.D. 
they continued to utilize them, nor did they entirely 

1 The interpretation adopted of III. 388 ff., if it be correct, gives 
another instance. 

it'.·. :' Siii.'.i 

 32 INTRODUCTION 

cease to do so till two centuries later. But the Sibyllines 
were destined to pass almost entirely out of Jewish 
hands. They were not retained among the apologetic 
weapons of Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism : and if 
this was due in part to the deep cleavage which divided 
Judaism from Hellenism after the revolt of Bar-Cochba, 
it was in larger measure due to the whole-hearted adop 
tion of the Sibyl by Christian apologists, and the addi 
tions made by Christian writers to the Sibylline 
literature. 

It may be that the Christian use of the oracles began 
with the formation of a body of testimonia from this and 
similar sources ; testimonia collected, like those from the 
Old Testament,1 to bear witness partly to the primary 
doctrines of monotheism and ethical purity, and partly 
to the anticipations of the Incarnation and the Cioss 
which could be discerned in pre-Christian prophecy. 
The frequent appeals in early Christian literature to 
" the Sibyl and Hystaspes " point in this direction ; and 
it has been suggested that the proœmium of Theophilus 
was derived from some such anthology of witness. But 
the Christian re-touching of the oracles began at an 
early date, very possibly in the first century A.D. ; and 
in the middle of the 2nd century Celsus was able2 to 
tax the Church with the deliberate forgery of spurious 
oracles, while Lucian's parodies3 are clearly aimed at 
Christian Sibyllists : in the story of the impostor Pere- 
grinus, who became a Christian and an apxLcrvvaywyevs, 
we read that he not only made a reputation as an 
interpreter of Christian βιβλία, but " some of them he 
also wrote himself." 

1 See Rendei Hariis, Testimonia. 

2 Orig. f. Cels. v. ór, vii. 56. 

3 Lucian, de mûrie Peregrini, 29, 30; Alexander, II. 

INTRODUCTION 

33 

The Christian Apologists accepted in entire good faith 
the existing Hellenic and Jewish tradition, and had no 
doubts as to the reality of the Sibyl's inspiration. Justin 
Martyr1 names Hystaspes, the Sibyl, and the prophets 
in the same breath. Athenagoras2 quotes from Book III., 
fortifying himself with a reference to Plato. In Theo 
philus of Antioch more than eighty lines are cited. His 
appeal is explicit : " The prophets spoke concerning the 
creation of the world and all other things, for they fore 
told famines, plagues and wars ; and there were not one 
or two only, but a number of them at various times 
among the Hebrews; moreover, among the Greeks there 
was the Sibyl : and these all gave consenting and harmo 
nious testimony both of things before and during their 
own time, and of things which are now coming to pass 
among us ; wherefore we believe that as the former 
things have been fulfilled, so it will be in respect of the 
future."3 To Clement of Alexandria the Sibyl is a 
prophetess, divinely taught (ίνθίως σφόδρα), " one of our 
own poets";4 she sang at God's behest, as Heraclitus 
says. "Just as God gave the prophets because He 
willed the salvation of the Jews, so He raised up the 
noblest of the Hellenes as prophets befitting their own 
way of speech, in so far as they were able to receive the 
good gift of God, and separated them from common 
men." Origen is only concerned to refute what he holds 
to be the calumny of Celsus, that there are Christian 
2ι/ΐυλλισταί,5 by challenging Celsus to produce ancient 
copies of the oracles in which the Christian passages are 
not to be found. He does not follow Clement in quoting 
the Sibyl herself. 

Yet Celsus was right, and it would seem that Greek 

1 Apol. I. 44. 2 Leg. 30. 
4 Strom. VI. v.; Protr. ii., viii., etc. 
C 

J ad Autol. II. 3, 36. 
5 e. Cels. vii. 56. 

 34 

INTRODUCTION 

Christianity came to recognize the fact. Down to Origen 
and Hippolytus1 the Greek use of the Sibyl was con 
tinuous; and Book Vili., a composition of the 3rd 
quarter of the second century, was doubtless the work of 
a Catholic Christian; but the later Christian books are 
tinged with heresy, and it would seem that in the East 
the Sibylline tradition passed off into the backwaters of 
Christian life : it recurs in the Apostolic Constitutions, 
and (very fully) in the pseudo-Justinian Cohortatio ad 
Grœcos, but for the rest its only home is in the regions of 
strange speculation and popular superstition. The great 
fathers of the fourth .century ignore it altogether. 

In the West the history of eschatological doctrine and 
apocalyptic literature took a different course, and the 
longer survival of the Sibyl among the Latin communi 
ties is only one instance of the general divergence. 
Tertullian follows the Greek apologists in giving a high 
place to the Sibyl. She is older than all literature: 
her evidence is the " testimonia divinarum literarum."2 
He is followed by Arnobius and Commodian, and, above 
all, by Lactantius. In the seven books of the Divina. 
Institutions, one of the series of polemical and apolo 
getic works which we may regard as precursors of the 
De Civitate Dei, Lactantius relies throughout, with im 
plicit confidence, on the testimony of the Sibyl. His 
armoury contains some strange weapons—pseudo-Orphic 
verses, oracles of Apollo, relics of the pseudo-Hystaspes, 
quotations from Hermes Trismegistus. To the last of 
these he attributes almost divine authority ;3 but the 
Sibyl stands higher : her witness is directly inspired 

1 dt Christo et Antichristo, 52. 

» Ad. Nat. II. 12 ; Apal. 19. 

3 Inst. i. 6, i, unum proferam quod est simile divino, et ob 
niraiam uetustatem et quod is quem nominabo ex hominibus in 
deos relatus est. 

INTRODUCTION 

35 

by God,1 he quotes it in the same breath as that of 
Isaiah and the Books of Kings.2 Lactantius is aware 
that the purity of the Sibylline text has been assailed : 
to assert that Christians have tampered with the 
oracles is the common refuge of those who cannot 
refute their witness. Yet, he argues, Cicero and Varrò 
and others who died before the advent of Christ refer 
to the Erythraean Sibyl and others, from whose books 
we take our quotations. All that we find in them stood 
there in Varro's time, and long before, but it could not 
be understood before it was fulfilled in the Incarnation : 
and that is why the Sibyl was thought to be insane and 
untruthful.8 What the Pagans did not understand we 
can interpret : we can prove that the revelation of mono 
theism stood in their own sacred books—that it was the 
teaching of Apollo himself.4 

An interesting comment on this attitude of Lactantius 
comes from the East, from Gregory of Nazianzus.5 It 
is true, he says, that Hermes and the Sibyl are ostensibly 
on the side of the Cross : yet they are not inspired ; they 
have merely borrowed from the Bible. On the other 
hand, the influence of Lactantius is clearly seen in one 
of Constantine's Declamations, the Oratio ad Sanctorum 
Caeiunif in which the acrostic of Book VIII. is quoted at 
length, the authority of the Sibyl is defended in Lactan- 
tian terms, and the IVth Eclogue is brought in as a 
prophecy of the Church (nova progenies') and the Christ, 
derived from Sibylline sources. Further, it is to Lactan 
tius, clearly, that the Sibyl owes her place among the 

1 it., nunc ad divina testimonia transeamus ; IV. 23, 4, sed nos 
ab humanis ad divina redeamus. Sibylla dicit haec, etc. 
a io., iv. 13, 21. » io., iv. IJ, 26-31. 
1 ib., i. 7, ι. « Carni. II. vii. 245 ff. 
• Appended to Eus., de Vita Constanfini. 

.·'.':!' lilÜlCff '':'. -U" 

 36 INTRODUCTION 

children of the City of God.1 Augustine, it is true, 
quotes tfte acrostic in a rough Latin version from a 
source which is independent of Lactantius, but the 
remainder of his reference to the Sibyl is taken directly 
from the Divine Institutes. That he ever made any 
independent use of the oracles is improbable ; and the 
favourable judgement of the de Civitate Dei is toned 
down elsewhere.2 Augustine does not rank the Sibyl 
with the prophets of the Church, nor attribute to her any 
authority of her own. 

Yet the name of Augustine, and the lesser fame but 
more copious quotations of Lactantius, sufficed to sustain 
the reputation of the Sibyl in Latin Christianity.3 The 
Greek collections of oracles were entirely unknown in 
the West ; but the tradition which originated with them 
lived on until in the middle ages. Their place was sup 
plied by a stream of forgeries, a stream which continued to 
flow down to the nineteenth century.4 

Of the mediaeval Sibyls and of the place of the Sibyl 
in Christian art this is not the place to write. Nor can 
we follow the traces of the Sibyl in the East. What one 
would like to know is how it came about that any MSS. 
of the oracles survived at all, and what was the cause of 
the revival of interest in them which led to their being 
recognized and recopied in the fourteenth century, which 
is the date of the earliest extant manuscripts. 

1 Aug. ae Civitaie Dei, xviii. 23. 

2 Contra Faktum Manichœum, xiii. I and 15. 

* Yet that reputation varied. In the Dies Irae, for the line, 
" Teste David cum Sibylla," an alternative version existed : " Crucis 
expandens uexilla." 

1 Geffcken in Preitssische Jahrbücher, 1901, p 214. 

INTRODUCTION 37 

V. NOTE ON THE NERO-LEGEND. 

THE birth of Nero, like that of Alexander the Great, 
was believed to have been marked by portents indicating 
his more than human descent and his high destiny.1 
The news of his death gave rise to strange rumours.2 
Nero, strange to say, was not universally hated. Half 
a century after his death it could be said that " even at 
this time all men long that he may be alive " (Dio Chrys. 
Or. xxi.). Possibly there was in many minds a doubt 
whether he had really died : and the doubt was suffi 
ciently general, as early as 69 A.D., at the time of Otho's 
accession, to tempt a pretender to appear on the strength 
of it (Tac. Hist. ii. 8, 9). Although his body was 
brought to Rome, to discredit his pretensions, he was 
followed by one, if not also by a second, imitator. It is 
not quite clear whether the second impostor appeared 
about 80 A.D. under Titus, and the third eight years later 
under Domitian, or whether the second and third were 
one and the same. Zonaras (in Dio Cass. LXVI. ii., 
see also Suet. Nero, 57) tells the story of one Terentius 
Maximus, an Asiatic, who, trading on his personal re 
semblance to Nero, and on the fact that like Nero he 
was a musician, collected a following in Asia and moved 
towards the Euphrates, gathering support as he went. 
He then took refuge with the Parthian king Artabanus, 

1 Cf. Sie. V. 140, and contrast 146. Suet., Nero 6, de genitura 
eius statini multa et formidolosa multis coniectantibus. According 
to Dio, LXI. 2, strange and supernatural lights were seen at his 
birth. 

2 A parallel case is that of Alexander the Great ; it was a popular 
belief for centuries that he had not died. As late as the end of 
the second century A.D. a pseudo-Alexander, trading on this super 
stition, headed a Dionysiac procession] from the Danube to 
Byzantium (Dio Cass., LXX1X. 18). 

lì!:; 

 38 INTRODUCTION 

who was so impressed by his claims, and so pleased to 
have a tangible ground for attacking Titus, that he 
almost declared war against Rome, in order to reinstate 
the alleged Nero on his throne. 

It seems probable that Terentius Maximus' adventure 
was designed to work along the lines of an already exist 
ing expectation, i. e. that Nero would re-appear from the 
far East : for the Nero-legend, as it appears in Or. Sib. 
Book V., appears to date, in some if not in all of its main 
features, from the time of Vespasian. A significant 
passage is V. 222-4, which must be read together with 
a passage in the Epistle of Barnabas (IV. 4). Nero is 
to " cut off three heads from among ten horns " ; " ten 
kingdoms," says Barnabas, " shall reign upon the earth, 
and after them shall rise up a little king, who shall lay 
low three of the kings in one." In like manner Daniel 
saith concerning the same : " And I saw the fourth beast, 
wicked and strong and untoward beyond all the beasts of 
the earth, and how that ten horns sprang out of it, and 
out of them as it were a little horn as an offshoot (τταρα- 
φυάδίον, cf. ·7ταραψυό/Λ£ΐ/οι/ κέρας, Or. Sib. III. 400), and 
how that it laid low three of the great horns in one. Ye 
ought therefore to understand." Lightfoot makes it 
highly probable {Apostolic Fathers, I. ii. 506 f.) that the 
"offshoot horn" here is the Antichrist, the ten horns are 
ten Caesars reckoning from Julius, and the three horns are 
Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian as associated together 
in the exercise of the imperial power. The meaning of 
the passage, then, is that Nero will return to make an 
end of the Flavian Caesars : it is expressed with delibe 
rate obscurity, as a dangerous truth, but in such a way 
that the initiate will understand. The Sibylline predic 
tion clearly has the same significance, and we may there 
fore infer that the expectation upon which both V. 222 ff. 

INTRODUCTION 

39 

and Barn. IV. 4 was based must have originated during 
the lifetime of Vespasian. 

The identification of the legendary Nero with the 
Antichrist (or his precursor) was eagerly made by Jewish, 
and still more so by Christian apocalyptists. "This 
persecutor of the disciples, this prodigy of wickedness 
and audacity who outraged humanity and defied nature, 
the son who murdered his mother, the engineer who 
would sever the Isthmus and join the two seas—who 
could he be but the man of sin, the Antichrist or the 
forerunner of the Antichrist?" (Lightfoot, loc. cit.). 
Thus in Rev. xiii. 3, 12, Nero is the beast whose "death- 
stroke was healed," he "who hath the stroke of the 
sword, and lived"; and in xvii. 8, n, he is "the beast 
who was and is not, and is about to come up out of the 
abyss and to go into perdition." 

In Or. Sib. III.-V. the following passages refer to this 
legendary figure: III. 63 (conceivably); IV. 117-124, 
Ι3Ί~139> ν· 27-34, ΐ37-!54 (perhaps also ιοο if.), 
214-224, 361-372. 

InV.27 ff.,2i4ff. the disappearance of Nero is connected 
with his ill-omened attempt to cut a canal through the 
Corinthian Isthmus, a work in which Jewish prisoners 
sent by Vespasian were employed. He did not die— 
here the tradition diverges from that in the Apocalypse— 
but ran from Rome as a fugitive (IV. 117, 138; V. 138, 
214), and took refuge beyond the Euphrates, beyond 
Parthia, with the Persians and the Medes. He was the 
cause of the destruction of Jerusalem : he plotted with 
the Medes and Persians against the Jews, and took the 
temple, burnt the citizens and those who went up to the 
temple. 

The delineations of V., compared with those of IV., 
are more highly coloured, and their apocalyptic content 

.t«!; 

'.iHHr. 

tdiiPttt: Jiirf...':it;iKi·. ; \ . 

 INTRODUCTION 

INTRODUCTION 

is fuller. In V. the second-century passage 27 ff. says 
that Nero will "make himself equal with God." The 
earlier passages are less definite and yet stronger. As in 
Rev. xii. 3 ff., "the whole earth wondered after the 
beast," so in 137!?., "when he appeared the whole 
creation was shaken " : as in Rev. xii. 5, there was given 
to him a mouth speaking great things . . . and authority ; 
so in 214 ff. he will "do great things, for God will give 
him power to do as no king had done before " : " he 
will devise more prudently than any man " (366) : he will 
seize upon Rome, and bring in a reign of terror which 
will only terminate with the great catastrophe of the end. 
All this is to come about "in the last time, when the 
moon reaches its- last days." And the Antichrist who 
will then appear will (like the Belial of the Ascension of 
Isaiah) be one who murdered his mother (363, 31, 145). 
His coming is divinely permitted (220), and (as in Rev. 
xiii. 7) the power which he is to wield will be given him 
by God. 

The later Sibylline books add nothing to the picture 
here drawn. But the belief that Nero was alive, and 
would return, did not die quickly. " Most men," said 
Dio Chrysostom early in the second century, " verily do 
believe at this day that Nero is living." It was held 
and asserted by Victorinus of Pettau at the end of the 
third century,1 and rejected as " delirious " by the author 
of Lactaniius de Morte Persecutorum? Jerome notes it 
as a common opinion,3 but passes no judgement upon it : 
Augustine 4 repudiates it with contempt, while Sulpicius 
Severus puts it, in an elaborate form, into the mouth of 

1 Victorinus in Apacalypsin, Corpus. Scr. Eccl. Lot. 49, p. 120. 

1 Laci, de Marli Pers., 2, 8. 

3 Jerome, Comm. in Dan. xi. 29. 

* Aug., De Civ. Dei, XX. 19. 

an interlocutor in a dialogue,1 and appears to hold it true 
himself.2 Even in the East there is a possible trace of 
it in St. Chrysostom,3 but whether he regarded Nero as 
anything more than a type of Antichrist is left—perhaps 
intentionally—obscure. 

VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
(i) EDITIONS. 

THE editto princeps is that of Betuleius (Sixtus Birken), 
Basle, 1545 : it was followed by that of Castalio (S. 
Châteillon), also published at Basle, in 1555, and by 
those of Opsopoeus (Joh. Koch), at Paris in 1599 and 
1607. No one appears to have anything good to say 
of the work of Servalius Gallaeus (Servais Galle), a 
polemical Protestant edition published at Amsterdam in 
1688; and the edition included by Gallanti in the 
Bibliotheca veterum Patrum (Venice, 1765) added only 
a little to the achievement of earlier scholars. The first 
discovery of Angelo Mai*· was published in 1817, and 
the second was included in the Scriptorum veterum nova 
collectio of 1828. A full account of his predecessors' 
work is given in the monumental work of C. Alexandre 
(Paris i84i,'53,'s6), which, with its voluminous Excursus 
and Supplementary Notes, is still indispensable to the 
student. This fine piece of erudition marks the beginning 
of the modern study of the Gracula. It was followed by 
the text, commentary, and German metrical rendering of 
/. H. Friedlieb (Leipzig, 1852) ; but the first attempt at 

1 Sulp. Sev. Dial. ii. 

1 \A.Hist.Sacr. II. xxix. "Creditur ... sub saeculi fine 
mittendus ut mysterium iniquitatis exerceat. 
3 Chrys. Horn. IV. an ii. Thess. 
* See above, p. 16. 

itil 

 42 INTRODUCTION 

a thorough critical study of the text was made by Alois 
Rzach (Vienna iSgr, followed by Analekta zur kritik 
und Exegese der S. O., Vienna 1907. Further progress 
was made by Joh. Geffcken, whose text (undertaken for 
the Prussian Kirchenväter Commission, and issued at 
Leipzig in 1902) has been mainly followed in the 
present translation. In his introduction Geffcken gives 
an account of various scholars, notably Mendelssohn and 
Buresch, who planned editions which they did not live 
to complete, and left valuable material behind them. 

(ii) TRANSLATIONS. 

Besides the rendering into Latin hexameters which 
forms part of the work of Alexandre, and the German 
hexameters of Friedlieb, the Oracles as a whole are 
accessible in the rendering of/. Flayer (London 1731) 
and that of M. S. Terry (New York, 1890), while Books 
III.-V., translated with valuable notes and an introduc 
tion by H. C. O. Lanchester, will be found in Vol. II. 
pp. 368 ff. of Dr. Charles' Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 
of the Old Testament (Oxford 1913) : they are also 
rendered into German prose by Blass in vol ii. of 
Kautzsch's Apokryphen und Pseiidepigraphen des alten 
Testaments (Tübingen, 1900). 

(iii) ESSAYS, ARTICLES, ETC. 

Out of the mass of literature dealing with the Sibylline 
Oracles it is only possible to mention here a few works 
which have been found useful, directly or indirectly, 
in the preparation of this book. 

Bousset, W., Antichrist. (English Translation.) 
„ Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen 
Zeitalter (cited as R. J.), (Berlin, 1903). 

INTRODUCTION 

43 

Schürer, The Jewish People in the time of Christ, 

Div. II. vol. iii., esp. pp. 271 if. 
Christ W., Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, IL 

i. pp. 463 ff. (in Müller's Handbuch der kl. 

Altertümer, vol. vii.). 
Badi, B., Ursprung, Inhalt und Text des vierten 

Buches der sibyllinischen Orakel (Breslau, 1878). 
Geffcken /., Komposition und Entstehungszeit der 

Oracula Sibyllina, in Texte und Untersuchungen 

(cited as T. U.) new series, vai. i. (Leipzig, 1902). 
Buresch, Klaros (Leipzig, 1889). 
Klausen, Aeneas und die Penateli, I. 203-312 

(Hamburg, 1839). 
Gruppe, Griechische Kulte und Mythen, pp. 675 ff. 

(Leipzig, 1887). 
Bousset, W., in Zeitschrift für neu testamentliche 

Wissenschaft, iii. 1902, pp. 23 ff. 
Geffcken J., in Nachr. der königlichen Gesellschaft der 

Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 1899, pp. 441 ff. 

(Studien zur älteren Nerosage). 
„ ib. 1900, pp. S8 ff. (Die babylonische Sibylle). 
„ in Preussische Jahrbücher, 1901 (November), 

pp. 193-214 (Die Sibylle). 

Zahn, Th., in Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft, 
vii., 1886, pp. 32 ff. 

Note.—The sign f is used in the translation to indicate 
passages where the text is specially obscure or corrupt. 

;M -'.i'-ii, C.· 

Mrif (»iiii.-'Jiiitti" 

 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

BOOK III 

1-7, 8-45 : A Prologue. 

HEAVENLY blessed One, thundering from on high, 
who enthroned dost hold the Cherubim in thy hand, 
give me rest a little space, who have uttered words of 
very truth : for my heart is weary within me. 

But why is this, that my heart again is shaken, and 
my spirit, smitten with a scourge, is driven fo proclaim 5 
unto all a voice from within her ? Yet once more will I 
utter all things that God bids me tell out to men. 

Ye men, to whom God has given an image shaped 
by Him in His likeness, why do ye vainly err, and walk io 

1-7. The Sibyl, true to her character (Plut., De Pyth. Or., VII. 
2ί/3υλλα μαινομίνψ στίμα,τι, καθ' Ήράκ\(ΐτον . . . φβίγγομίνη. 
Verg., Aiti. VI. 76—80) speaks only under the stress of inspiration. 
This is maintained throughout Book III. (cf. 162ff., 295 ff., 489ff.) 
and Book V. (52, in, 286), and is implied in the opening of IV. 
cf. 162ff., 489«:, 295ff., IV. 18, V. 52, in, 286. 

8—45. Proclamation of monotheism and polemic against idolatry, 
especially that of the Egyptians (30). For this passage Blass (in 
Kautzsch, Apokryphen, II. 184) substitutes the similar lines from 
Theoph., Ad. Autol. ii. 366, which Theophilus alleges to come from 
the Sibyl iv ap\fj rrjs n-pocfujTtini. But the Theophilus passage is 
less simple than 8-45, and has one clearly Christian line. Geffcken 
(T. U. 15, 69 ff.) decides in favour of 8-45, which, however, 
he considers to be probably Christian, on the ground that they 
follow the regular routine of Christian apologetic. It would be 
safer to say that they represent just the type of Jewish argumenta 
tion which Christian apologists most eagerly borrowed. See the 
refs, in Geffcken, Comm. ad. loc. 

45 

WKH» 

 46 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

47 

not in a straight path, remembering ever the immortal 
Creator? There is one God, sole ruler, ineffable, dwell 
ing in the sky, self-begotten, invisible, who Himself 
alone seeth all things : whom the hand of the stone- 
worker made not, nor does the form shaped by art 

15 of man from gold or ivory reveal Him ; but the Eternal 
Himself revealed Himself, who is and was and ever shall 
be: for who being mortal can behold God with his 
eyes? or who can bear even to hear but the name of 

20 the great God of heaven that ruleth the world ? Who 
by His word created all things, the heaven and the sea 
and the unwearying sun and the moon at her full, and 
the shining stars, the mighty mother Tethys, fountains 
and rivers, fire undying, days and nights. He is the God 

25 who formed Adam, name of four letters, who was first 
created, and took the full meaning of his name from 
East and West and South and North; and He estab 
lished the form and shape of mortals, and made the 
beasts, birds and creeping things. Ye worship Him 

30 not, nor do ye fear God, but vainly err, adoring serpents 

II. "The belief in the one invisible spiritual God, who, Himself 
uncreated, has called out from Himself this visible creaturely world, 
is the supreme essential in the mission-preaching of Hellenistic 
Judaism" (Bousset, A. /. 296). The Jewish verses ascribed to 
Orpheus, /Eschylus, Sophocles, etc., illustrate this as clearly as do 
the Sibylline books: cf. IV. io ff., and Exod. xxiv. 9-11 (LXX.), as 
contrasted with Ps. xvii. 15, Isaiah xxxviii. n. 

18. The name: cf. Lev. xviii. 16 (LXX.). " He that nameth the 
name of the Lord, let him die the death," and tlie legend quoted 
from Alex. Polyhistor by Eus., Prœp. Εν. IX. xxvii.—"and when 
the king (Pharaoh) heard it (the Name) he fell speechless." Cf. 
Bousset, R.J. 302 ff. 

25. The four letters of Adam represent Anatole, Dusis, Arktos, 
Mesembria; cf. 2 Enoch, 30. 13; this "acrostic" reappears in 
ps-Cyprian De Montibus Siria et Siati, 4. It implies the existence 
of a tradition that Greek was the original language : cf. Jub. 3, 28, 
note. 

30. See the similar denunciations of Egyptian animal-worship. 
in V. 77 ff., 279 f., etc. The topic was congenial to Jewish and 

and doing sacrifice to cats and dumb idols, and to 
images of men wrought in stone, and to godless temples, 
sitting before their doors ; f ye do not pay observance to 
the God Who is, who guardeth all things, ye who rejoice 
in vile stones, forgetting the judgement of the immortal 35 
Saviour who made heaven and earth. Ah, bloodthirsty 
race, guileful, evil, impious : race of false men, double- 
tongued, crafty, adulterous, guileful in mind, in whose 
breasts evil is implanted, a raging frenzy : who grasp at 40 
plunder for themselves, shameless in spirit; for none 
that has wealth and possessions will give a share to 
another, but grievous wickedness shall be found among 
all mortals, and they will not keep faith, but many a 
woman that is a widow will give herself in secret love 
to men, and will not keep to the plumb-line of life in 45 
wedlock. 

45-62. Woes upon Rome : the Messianic Kingdom and 

Judgement. 

But when Rome shall rule over Egypt, though still 
delaying, then shall the great kingdom of the immortal 
Christian apologists alike ; cf. Letter of Aristeas, 138, Justin, Apol. 

Î. 24, 2. 

35. Saviour: cf. Wisd. xvi. 7, Ecclus. li. i, i Mace. iv. 30, 
3 Mace. vi. 32. . 

46-62. The dating of this passage depends partly on the identi 
fications of the "three" in 1. 52, and partly on the interpretation of 
11. 46-7. (a) If the " three" are the Second Triumvirate, Antony, 
Lepidus, Octavius, the passage is not earlier than the period between 
43 and 31 B.c., when Roman sovereignty in Egypt, already asserted 
by the removal of Ptolemy Auletes in 51 B.c., had not yet been 
organized as it was after the battle of Actium. (6) A less likely 
interpretation identifies the "three" with the First Triumvirate, 
Cäsar, Pompey and Crassus, 60 B.c.; the miseries of the Second 
Triumvirate might well be described as laying Rome waste, but 
the words would hardly fit the situation of 60 B.c. (c) It is still 
less likely that 1.46 refers to the discomfiture of Antiochus Epiphanes 
by Popillius Lœnas at Eleusis in 168 B.c., the "three" being on 
that view the Gracchi, (d) Lanchester is inclined to refer I. 46 to 

IH»P t 

 48 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

49 

king appear among men, and a holy king shall come 
50 who shall have rule over the whole earth for all ages of 
the course of time. Then shall implacable wrath fall 
upon the men of Latium ; three men shall ravage Rome 
with pitiable affliction ; and all men shall perish beneath 
their own roof-tree, when the torrent of fire shall flow 
55 down from heaven. Ah, wretched me, when shall that 
day come, and the judgement of immortal God, the 
great king? Yet still be ye builded, ye cities, and all 
adorned with temples and theatres, with market squares 
and images of gold, silver and stone, that so ye may 
60 come to the day of bitterness. For it shall come, when 
the smell of brimstone shall pass upon all men. But I 
will tell out singly how many are the cities in which men 
shall suffer ill. 

the bequest of Cyrene to the Roman people by Ptolemy Apion in 
96 B.c., and to identify the " three " with Marius, Sulla and Cinna. 

But (i) a comparison of the Messianic figure in II. 49-50 with 
that in Ps. Sol. xvii. 23 ff., ι Enoch, 48. 5, 2 Baruch, 72. 2 ff., 
suggests a late date for the passage ; and (2) this is supported by 1. 54 : 
the predicted conflagration is universal and "apocalyptic": it can 
hardly refer to any actual event (such as the fire on the Capitol in 
83 B.C.). Now the conception of a world-destioying fire preceding 
the New Age is a feature of late Apocalyptic (Bousset, R.J., cf. III. 
83ff., V. 54ff., 72ff.; and it seems, therefore, probable that 46-62 
belongs to the latest Jewish stratum of Book III. 

The Tuie of the holy King in 11. 46 ff. ends in judgement and 
calamity. Similaily, in ι Enoch 91. 11-19, 93· Γ-Ι4, the "eighth 
week " is that of a kingdom which ends in judgement : cf. Sii., III. 
652-660, and I Cor. xv. 23-28. Dominant in late Apocalyptic 
(as in Rev. xx. and 2(4) Ezra), this conception is foreign to the 
earlier literature. Whether it is pre-Christian at all seems to be 
doubtful. 

60. brimstone. Luke xvii. 29 f. = Gen. xix. 24. 

63ff. Who are the Sebasteni from whom Belial is to come? 
According to Bousset, Antichrist, 96 f. (E. T.) they are the Augusti ; 
Antichrist is to spring from the dynasty of the Óesars, a view not 
easy to square with Bousset's belief that the passage is earlier than 
the age of Augustus. When Suetonius says (Nero xl.) that the 
dominion of the East and the kingdom of Judah were foretold 

63-92, 93-96. Miracles and Doom of Antichrist ; the 
final Conflagration ; return of the Messiah. 

Now from the Sebastenes shall Belial return, and he 
shall move the high mountains, still the sea, shall make 65 
the great blazing sun and the bright moon stand still, 
shall raise the dead and do many signs among men : 
yet shall his signs not be fulfilled. But he leads 
many astray, and shall deceive many faithful and elect 
of the Hebrews, and lawless men besides, who never 70 
yet hearkened to God's word. 

But when the threatenings of the great king come 
near to fulfilment, and a fiery power comes through the 
deep to land and burns up Belial and all men of pride, 
even all that put their trust in him : then shall the 75 
world be ruled beneath a woman's hand, and" obey her 
in all things. And when a widow rules over the whole 
world, and casts gold and silver into the deep sea with 

to Nero during his lifetime, it is to a tradition of this kind that he 
refers. 

But, according to Geffcken and Jiilicher, the Sebasteni are the 
people of Samaria, which was re-named Sebaste by Herod the 
Great in 25 B.c. ; the Antichrist from Samaria must be connected 
with Simon Magus, and the whole passage shows a Christian hand. 

63. Beliar: on the name see Bousset, R. J. 328 f. The Anti 
christ of Si!>. V. is a tyrant ; here he is a false prophet, as often in 
Christian tradition, e.g. 2 Thess. ii. I-I2, Rev. xiii. I-i8 (cf. 
I John ii. 18, etc.), Mark xiii. 22, 2 Thess. ii. gf. ; Didache 16, 
' ' then shall appear the deceiver of the world as Son of God." He 
is called Beliar as in 2 Cor. vi. 15 : so also in Asc. Is. iv. 2. 

64. «Γτήσ« apparently here = raise up, take away, lemove, in 
65 "cause to stand still," and in 66 merely "raise up." For the 
portents of Antichrist (Mark xiii. 22) see Bousset, Antichrist (Ë.T '.), 

- 

75. The Woman, and the Widow of 1. 77 are Rome (rather than 
Cleopatra) ; Rev. xvii. 3, etc. : cf. Sii. Vili. 194. 

78. Cast gold and silver into the sea. It is tempting to see here 
a reference to Nero's vast project, actually begun and abandoned, 
of cutting a canal from Lake Avermis to Ostia ; Tac. Ann. xv. 42, 
Suet. Nero 31. 

 50 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

80 the bronze and iron of short-lived mortals, then shall all 
the elements of the world be as one widowed, when God 
that dwelleth in the heavens shall roll up the sky as a 
book is rolled up : and the whole firmament .with its 
many signs shall fall upon the earth and the sea ; and 

85 then shall flow a ceaseless torrent of liquid fire, and 
shall burn up the earth and burn up the sea, and melt 
down the firmament of heaven, the days and the very 
creation, fusing them into one clear mass. 

And then no longer does one pay heed to the 
planetary spheres that laugh aloud, nor to night nor 

90 daybreak, nor to day following day, nor to spring and 
summer, autumn and winter. And then shall come 
forth the judgement of the great God, in the great age, 
when all these things come to pass. 

Ah, for the waters where go the ships, and for all the 
dry land, when that sun rises which shall not set again ! 
95 All things shall obey him when he returns to the world ; 
therefore was he the first to know his own power. 

So. Cf. Sib. II. 206 ff., Isaiah xxxiv. 4, 2 Pet. iii. io. The 
"elements" here and in Sii. II. are (air), earth, sea, starry 
heaven, day and night. 

87. A faint reminiscence of Mal. iii. 3, χωνίύων teal καθορίζων. 

89 f. Close parallels in 2(4) Ezra vii. 39 f., cf. 2 Enoch 65-7. The 
" great age " is one and timeless : 2 Enoch 33. 2, " I appointed 
. . . that at the beginning of the eight thousand years there should 
be a time of not-counting, endless, with neilher years nor months 
nor weeks nor days nor hours." For the place of this conception 
in Stoic doctrine see Zeller, III. i. 154, note 2, Phil, der Gr. ; fur 
Jewish illustrations, and Persian analogues, Bousset, R.J. 232 ff., 
476, note 3. 

92. The great God. For the increased stress laid upon the 
Divine transcendence in later Judaism, and its influence upon names 
and attiibutes employed, see Bousset, R. J. 302 ff., especially 305, 
note 8. 

93-6. Clearly Christian ; on 95 cf. I Cor. xv. 27, Heb. ii. 8 ; 
the line is apparently quoted in Ps. Just. Coh. ad Gr. 38. 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 51 

97-154. T/ie Tower of Babel : myth of Kronos and 
the Titans. 

But when the threatenings of the great king come to 
fulfilment, wherewith once he threatened mankind, when 
they built a tower in the land of Assyria, and were all 
of one speech, and wished to climb up to the starry Ioo 
heaven, then straightway the Immortal laid a great com 
mand upon the winds : and when the winds cast down 
the tower great and high, and stirred up strife among 
mortals against each other; then did mortals give the 
name of Babylon to their city. 

But when the tower had fallen, and the languages of 105 
men were changed into divers tongues, then the whole 
world of men was filled with divided kingdoms ; and 
then was the tenth generation of mortal men since the 
deluge came upon those of old time. Then reigned no 
Kronos, Titan and lapetus, the noblest children of Gaia 
(earth) and Ouranos (heaven), whom men called Earth 
and Heaven because they were the foremost of mortal 
men. These had each for his portion a third part of 
the earth, and each held and ruled his own portion "5 

96. The text is obscure ; Lancliester conjectures tirliyvuf for 
iirtyvia; "forasmuch as he first fashioued them, and his might"; 
but possibly iiriyva or (πργνώικι is right, and the allusion is to 
such a consciousness of power as is expressed in Matt. xi. 27. 

97—154. Geftcken has shown {Nachrichten der k. Gesellschaft zu 
Gältingen, 1900, 88 ff., TU 2 ff.) that this section is a Jewish 
redaction of material from the Babylonian Sibyl. Alexander 
Polyhistor (in Josephus, Ant. I. iv. 3) knew the Babylonian version ; 
he quotes the Sibyl for the stoiy of the tower, thus : " but the 
gods sent winds and overthrew the tower, and gave each man a 
sepai ate language." Other refs. in Geffcken's note. 

113. they were . . . mortal men: this is not merely an 
" euhemerism " ; it is directly derived from Euhemerus, from whose 
"humanized mythology" the Babylonian Sibyl took the whole 
story of the Titans, is may be seen from Ennius' version of 
Euhemerus quoted in Lactantius, Div. fnst. I. 14, 2. 

RI itH»(i'iî;iVïlf,i:îfïitSHi t'.' 

~ι«ί·; ri 

ΪΠίίΙί. 

Η···ιϊΐί?ι:ΐ«1ίίΐί·.·<·|ίίίΜ· 

 52 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

without conflict ; for an oath had been laid on them 
by their father and a just apportionment. But when the 
full time came, and their father was old, then he died : 
then his sons transgressed grievously the oath and stirred 

120 up strife against each other, which of them should have 
royal honour and rule over all mankind; and now 
Kronos and now Titan fought against the others. But 
them did Rhea and Gaia and Aphrodite lover of garlands 
with Demeter and Hestia and fair-tressed Dione bring 
to agreement : for they gathered together all the kings, 

Γ25 their brothers' kindred, and those of their own blood, 
and others such as were of one blood and parentage 
with them; and they adjudged that Kronos as king 
should rule over all, for that he was eldest and noblest 
to look upon. Thereupon Titan laid upon Kronos a 

130 great oath, that he would not bring up male offspring 
which should have kingship when old age and destiny 
should come upon Kronos : but whenever Rhea bore a 
child, by her sat the Titans, and tore in pieces all the 
men-children, but the maids they left alive with their 

135 mother, to be reared. But when the lady Rhea brought 
forth for the third time, she bare Hera first, and when 
they saw with their eyes that the child was a maid, the 
Titans those fierce men went off by themselves: and 
then Rhea brought forth a man-child ; him she sent 

140 swiftly to be nurtured apart and in secret, to Phrygia, 
laying three men, Cretans, under an oath ; therefore they 
called him Zeus, because he was sent thither. And in 

116. oath . . . apportionment; with this may be compared 
Noah's division of the earth into three lots, and the oath with 
which it was ratified ; see Jub. 8 and 9, esp. 8, n flf., 9, 14. 

141. Δία . . . &Tiìì διεπέμφθη. The usual Stoic account of the 
name Δία is that through Zeus all things were made ; this re 
appears in Jewish writings, e.g., Aristeas, 16. The Sibyllist's 
version is on a lower level of intelligence. 

..iiiii·. <rpttRiu"i urn 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

53 

like manner she sent over Poseidon secretly. Yet a 
third time Rhea that fair goddess bare Pluto, on her 
way past Dodona, whence flow the watery ways of the 145 
river' Europus, and pass to mingle with Peneius, and 
men call the stream Stygian. But when the Titans 
heard that there were men-children kept secretly, whom 
Kronos had begotten of Rhea his consort, then Titan 
gathered his sixty sons and kept in bondage Kronos and 150 
Rhea his consort, hid them in the earth, and kept them 
in bonds and in ward. This then the sons of mighty 
Kronos heard, and stirred up great war and battle 
against him ; and this was the beginning of war for all 155 
mortals. 

And then God made evil to come upon the Titans, 
and all the offspring of the Titans and of Kronos 
perished. But then in the course of time he raised up 
the kingdom of Egypt, then of the Persians, Medes, 160 
^Ethopians and Assyrian Babylon ; thereafter of the 
Macedonians, then again that of Egypt, and then of 
Rome. 

162-195- The Kingdoms of the earth, down to Rome as 
the destroyer of the Seleucids. 

Thereon the voice of the great God arose in my heart, 
and bade me prophesy over all the earth and before 
kings, and to put them in mind of that which was to 
be. And this first did God give into my mind, how 165 
many empires shall be raised up among men. 

161. The insertion of Egypt in the series of world-powers be 
tween Macedonia and Rome betrays an Egyptian hand 

156-210. The disorder of this section is inextricable. The 
general idea seems to be a transition from the myth of the Titans 
to an outline of world-history, ending with that of Isiael : and this 
transition is lepealed in seveial forms, with matter of veiy various 
dates and kinds entangled in it. Thus in 156-161 we have the series 

rit*-i^-tß-i(iH'Hi'ii»«intHmiiiHii»iiWin;.Hriiti'lf!ntij Hit1' 

 54 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

55 

First of all the house of Solomon shall bear rule, f and 
the Phoenicians, invaders of Asia and the isles as well, 
and the race of Pamphylians, the Persians and Phrygians, 

170 the Carians and Mysians, and the wealthy race of 
Lydia. 

But then shall come the Greeks, proud and profane 
people ; then that other people, the Macedonian, great 
and diverse, who shall come upon men as a dread cloud 
of war j but the God of heaven shall utterly root them 
out. 

175 But then there shall be the beginning of another 
empire from the western sea, white and many-headed, 
which shall rule over wide lands, and overthrow many 
and make all kings to fear thereafter, and ravish much 

180 gold and silver out of many cities ; but yet again there 
shall be gold in the fair earth, and therewith silver and 
precious things : and they shall vex mankind. But great 
shall be the fall of those men, when they fall to pride 
and unrighteousness. Straightway they shall be driven 
185 into impious doings : men with men shall have inter 
course, and they will put boys for hire in houses of 
shame; and in those days there shall be great tribula 
tion among men, and it shall bring all to confusion 
and disorder, filling the world with evils, through base- 

—Titans, Egypt, Peisia, etc., Macedonia, Egypt, Rome ; then in 
167 flf.—House of Solomon, Phoenicians, etc., Lydia, Hellas, Mace 
donia, Rome; and again in 199 — Titans, Hellas, Persia, etc., 
Israel. After this comes (218-294) a fairly continuous prophecy of 
Israel, its origin, character, exile, restoration, and Messianic King. 

176. many-headed: i.e. a republic. 

178. Cf. the account of the Roman power in ι Mace. viii. 2-4. 

185 f. While the body of this passage, and especially 11. 194-5, 
seems to reflect the feeling of I Mace. viii., and may belong to the 
same period, the accusation of 1. 185 must be far later : it has many 
parallels in the Christian apologists (Just. Apal. i. 27, Athenag. 
Leg. 34, Tatian, Or. 28, etc.), but was not true of Rome in the 
Maccabean period. 

living love of gain, through wealth ill-gotten, and that in 190 
many lands, but in Macedonia most of all. It shall stir up 
hatred, and guile of all kinds shall be found among them 
[down to the seventh king's reign, the reign of a king 
of Egypt, a Greek by birth]. 

Then shall the people of the great God once more 195 
be strong, they who are to be the guides of life to 
all mankind.. 

But what is this that God has put in my mind to utter, 
even the first, the next, and the last calamity that 
shall fall upon mankind, and the beginning of these 
things ? 

First shall God bring calamity upon the Titans ; for 200 
they shall receive punishment at the hands of the sons 
of mighty Kronos, for that they bound Kronos and 
the lawful mother of his children. Next shall tyrants 
rule over Greece, and lawless kings, proud and unholy, 
breakers of wedlock and wholly evil; then shall men 
have no more rest from war. The terrible Phrygians 205 
shall all perish, and evil shall come upon Troy in that 
day. Thereafter shall evil come to the Persians and 
Assyrians and all Egypt and Libya, upon the Ethiopians, 
on the Carians and Pamphylians f a ruin of exile, and to 210 
all men alike. Why declare these things one by 
one? 

190. Here we appear to return to the second century B.c., the 
reference being to the battle of Pydna, 168 B.c., which brought to 
an end the empire of Alexander the Great ; but 182-9 appears to be 
clumsily interpolated. 

195. Cf. Ath. de Ine. xii. : " the prophets . . . were for all the 
world a holy school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of 
the soul " ; and Philo. Vit. Mas. ii. 4 : " the law attracts and 
converts all men, Greeks and barbarians ... the whole inhabité^ 
vorld from one end to the other." 

η!;::·::ΰ·:·;ιί':ϊιϋίΊι:!ί(< i'ìf.r '' 

 56 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

211-294. The Jewish people, tiieir character and history, 
down to the return from exile. 

As soon as the first woe shall come to an end, the 
next shall come upon men. Yet will I declare the first 
things—evil shall come upon the god-fearing who dwell 
around the great temple of Solomon and are the offspring 

215 of righteous fathers. Yet will I declare the tribes of 
these men, and the generation of their fathers, and their 
people, circumspectly, thou man of many wiles and 
crafty mind. 

There is on earth a city, Ur of the Chaldees, from 

42O which springs a race of upright men, ever given to wise 
counsel and good works. For they busy themselves not 
with the circling course of the sun, or the moon, nor 
with monstrous things below the earth, nor with the 
depth of the sparkling sea of Ocean, nor the signs of 

225 birds and winged fowls, nor with diviners nor sorcerers 
nor enchanters, nor with the deceitful follies of ven 
triloquists, nor do they predict by the stars as do the 
Chaldaeans, nor consult the heavenly bodies ; for all 
those things are deceitful, all that foolish men search 

330 out day after day, exercising their minds in toil which 
has no profit : and they have taught lessons of shame 

218. A city. The MSS. have a lacuna in this line : i<m iro\is . . . 
κατά xoovis Ουρ ΧαΛδαιωι/, The missing word is "Camarina." 
The Jewish historian Eupolemus (in Eus., Piœp. Εν. IX. Ι7· 3) 
said that Abraham was bom in the tenth (or thiiteenlh) generation 
after the fall of the tower of Babel, in the Babylonian city Camarina, 
called also Urie ; and that he was the inventor ol astrology and 
Clialdaean science. It would seem that 217-233 is an attack on this 
tiadition, based on scriptural grounds (Deut. xviii. io, Isaiah xlvii. 
13.etc.). 

223. sparkling: Χαροποιό. This uncommon word is a literal y 
link between Or. Sib., ps. Sophocles, and the Jewish Orphic verses. 

234-246. For this list of viitues. cf, Sib. II. 56 ff., and Bousset 
*-/-399f. 

U mitt 

!. »H» 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

57 

and error to men, wherefrom many evils visit men upon 
the earth, to cause them to err from good ways and 235 
righteous works. But these take thought for uprightness 
and goodness, not for love of gain, which brings forth 
countless evils among mortal men, war and famine with 
out end. They keep just measure in town and country, 
they go not a-stealing from one another by night, nor 
drive off herds of oxen, sheep and goats, nor does neigh- 240 
bour remove neighbour's landmark, nor a wealthy man 
oppress a poorer, nor deal harshly with the widow, but 
rather helps her with supplies of corn and wine and 
oil. Ever does he that has abundance among the 
people give a portion of his harvest to them that have 
nothing and are in poverty, fulfilling the command of the 245 
great God, the oracle of the law ; for the Lord of heaven 
made the earth to be possessed by all in common. 

But when the people of the twelve tribes shall leave 
Egypt, and go out on its way led by men divinely sent, 
led on their journey by night by a pillar of fire, and by a 250 
pillar of cloud all the hours of the day, over them He 
will set a great man as leader, even Moses, whom a 
princess found and took from a reed-bed, and brought 
him up and called him her son. And when he came 
leading the people which God brought from Egypt to 255 
the sheer mountain of Sinai, God gave them His law 
from heaven, writing all the ordinances of righteousness 
on two tables, and bade them to keep them ; and if one 
should disobey, he should suffer the penalty of the law 

235. Cf. ι Tim. vi. lo, and Bernard's note, in Camb. Gk. Test. 
The sentiment comes from the common stock of Hellenic maxims. 

247. In common : A Stoical principle adopted by Jewish teachers, 
which afterwaids (partly through the influence of Cicero) found 
wide acceptance and constant expression in Christian ethical writers ; 
cf. c. g. Ambrose in Ps. cviii. 8, Dominus Deus noster terrain hanc 
possessionem omnium hominum voluil esse communem : see A. J. 
and W. W. Carlyle, Medieval Political Theory, ch. xii. 

 58 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

260 either at the hands of men, or escaping men's judgement 
should most justly perish. . . . 

For them only the grain-bearing earth brings her full 
harvest a hundred-fold, fulfilling the measure of God. 

265 But upon them too shall evil fall, nor shall they escape 
pestilence. And thou also shalt go into exile, and leave 
the fair temple-court, for it is thy fate to leave the holy 
ground. And thou shalt be taken away to the Assyrians, 

270 and see thy little children and thy wives enslaved among 
thine enemies ; all thy livelihood and wealth shall be 
destroyed : and all the earth shall be filled with thee, 
and all the sea : every man shall hold thy ordinances in 
hatred; and all thy land shall be desolate, and the 
builded altar and the temple of the great God and the 

275 long walls shall all fall to the ground, because thou didst 
not set thy mind to obey the holy law of immortal God, 
but didst err and serve shapeless idols, and wouldst not 
honour the God of all mankind, nor fear the immortal 
Father of gods and of all men, but didst honour images, 

280 the work of men. Wherefore thy fruitful land shall be 
desolate, and the wonders of the temple, for seven times 
ten years. Yet a good end awaits thee, and great glory, 
as immortal God hath decreed for thee ; but wait thou, 

28; and trust the holy law of the great God, until he lift up 
and make straight thy knees that are weary, unto the 
light. And then shall God send a king from heaven (or, 
the God of heaven shall send a king) and shall judge 

276 if. Cf. Jerem. v. 19, etc. 

280. Cf. Jerem. xxv. 12. 

286-7. On 'h's passage see Introd. p. 31. In the king divinely 
sent to end the exile one would expect to find a reference to Cyrus ; 
but here we have an eschatological figure instead. 

287. bloodand . . .fire. Cf. Isaiah Ixvi. 15-16, Ezek. xxxviii. 
22. 

388-9. Cf. Gen. xlix. 8 f. 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

59 

every man in blood and blazing fire. But there is a 
royal tribe whose seed shall not stumble, and it shall 
reign as time follows time, and shall begin to raise up 
the temple of God anew. And all the kings of the 290 
Persians shall lend their aid, with brass and gold and 
wrought iron. For God himself shall send a holy dream 
by night, and then shall the temple be restored again as 
it was. 

295-333. Jewish oracles on Babylon, Egypt, Gog and 
• Magog, and Libya. 

When my soul ceased from the hymn inspired, then 295 
I besought the great father that I might rest from my 
labour ; but again the voice of the great God rose up in 
my breast, and bade me prophesy over every land, and 
to kings, and to instruct them of things which should 
come to pass. 

And this first did God put in my mind to say, even all 300 
the distressful woes which the Immortal had devised 
against Babylon, because she laid waste his great temple. 

Woe to thee, Babylon, and to you, ye men of Assyria : 
a rushing sound shall come one day upon all the land of 
sinners, and a shout of battle shall destroy all the land 305 
of men, even a stroke from the hand of great God, who 
putteth songs in our mouth. 

For from above He shall come upon thee, O Babylon, 
riding on the air [yea, from heaven He shall descend 

291. Cf. Ezr. vii. 15 f. 

293. Cf. perhaps I Esdr. iii. 13 ff., LXX. 
303 ff. Cf. Isaiah xiii. 4 ff., xlvii. i ff. 
307. Cf. Isaiah xiii. 5, LXX. 

 6ο 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

upon thee from the Holy place], and eternal destruction 
.îio upon the children of wrath, j And then shalt thou be as 
thou wert before, as one that has never been ; and then 
shalt thou be filled with blood, as once thou didst shed 
the blood of the good and upright and holy, whose blood 
even now cries to high heaven. 

315 Upon thee, O Egypt, a great blow shall fall and a 
terrible, upon thy house, such as thou never thoughtest 
should come upon thee. For a sword shall pass through 
the midst of thee, dispersion and death and famine shall 
rest on thee in the seventh generation of thy kings, and 
then shalt thou have rest. 

320 Woe to thee, land of Gog and Magog, in the midst of 
the rivers of Ethiopia : what a stream of blood shall flow 
out upon thee, and thou shalt be called among men the 
house of judgement, and thy land shall drink and be 
drenched with red blood. 

Woe to thee, Libya ; woe, sea and land : daughters 

325 of the West, to how bitter a day shall ye come ! and 
ye shall come under the pursuing of a grievous con- 

310. Cf. Isaiah xiii. 19, Apoc. Bar. xxxi. 5. 

314-18. The reference is apparently, as in 608-615 infr., to the 
invasion of Egypt by Antiochus Epiphanes in the lime of Ptolemy 
Physkon (Euergetes II., 146 B.c.), and the passage thus will belong 
to the earliest Jewish stratum of the book. 

319. Gog and ATagog. The prophecies of Ezek. xx\viii.-\xxix., 
in which Gog of the land of Magog is a mighty adversary who will 
be raised up against Israel in the latter years and will then be utterly 
destroyed, exercised a strong influence upon Jewish eschatological 
conceptions. Heieand 512 infr. Gog and Magog are the adversary 
whose annihilation must precede the Messianic age ; cf. Rev. xx. 
7 f.,I Enoch 56, 2 Baruch 70. 7-10 : also Num. xxiv. (LXX.). For 
the influence of this idea in later Judaism see Bous^et, R. J. 206 f., 
Antichrist, Index. 

The identification of Gog and Magog with Ethiopia (and not with 
northern peoples as in Kzek. xxxix. 2) accords with V. 505 f., where 
the coming of the last things follows on an Ethiopian invasion, but 
is not found elsewhere. 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

61 

flict, hard and terrible : a dread judgement shall there 
be once more, and ye shall all be driven to destruction, 
for that ye laid waste the holy house of the Immortal, 
and gnawed it grievously with teeth of iron. Therefore 330 
shalt thou see thy land full of dead bodies, slain by 
war, by every onset of God, by famine and pestilence, 
and by foes of savage heart (or of strange speech) and 
all thy land shall be desolate, and the fortress of thy 
city (or, and thy cities forsaken). 

334-336· An oracle '/44 B.C. (?). 
But in the West a star shall shine, which men will call 
the long-haired star, a sign of the sword, of famine and 335 
death to men, of the slaughter! of great captains and 
men of renown. 

337-355. Hellenic oracles. 

And yet again there shall be great signs among men ; 
for deep-eddying Tanais shall fail from the lake Maeotis, 
and down the deep stream-bed shall go the furrow of a 
fruitful field, and the river shall stay its many branches. 340 
Chasms and yawning gulfs shall break open ; many cities 
shall fall in ruins with all their people : in Asia, lassus, 
Kehren, Pandemia,! Colophon, Ephesus, Nicœa, Antioch, 

328. the holy Aause : i. e. a temple in Egypt, not that at 
Jerusalem ; cf. V. 507. 

334-6. This prediction corresponds with the circumstances of 
B.c. 44, and may have been suggested by them ; in that year, after 
the death of Julius Cssar, the young Octavian celebrated games to 
Venus Victrix, in commemoration of the victory of Pharsalus ; 
during the games a comet of exceptional brightness was visible for 
seven days, and was believed to be the soul of Caesar. Suetonius, 
Julius 88, Plin. Net. Hist. II. 94. 

338-349. The names given do not tally with the records of any 
known disaster, such as that mentioned in Tac. Ann. II. 47 ; yet it 
is possible that the wriier has grouped wiih the cities actually visited 
by some definite calamity others known to have been so affected at 
some time. The passage defies clear explanation. 

 62 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

345 Syagra, Sinope, Smyrna, Mvrine,t Gaza with all its wealth, 
Hierapolis, Astypalsea; and in Europe Cyagra-f renowned, 
troyal Meropeia, Antigone, Magnesia, -jxh'vine Mycene. 
Know thou then that the doomed race of Egypt is near 
its ruin, and then shall they of Alexandria wish that this 
year was as last. 

350 For all the wealth that Rome took from tributary Asia, 
three times as much shall Asia take from Rome, re 
quiting upon her her cursed arrogance : and for all the 
men who were taken from Ask to go and dwell in Italy, 

355 twenty times so many men of Italy shall serve in Asia 
as penniless slaves, and a thousand-fold shall be the 
requital. 

356-380. Jewish oracles against Rome. 

Daughter of Latin Rome, clothed in gold and luxury, 
drunken full oft with thy wedding of many wooers, thou 
shall be a slave-bride in dishonour, and oft shall thy 
360 mistress cut off thy flowing hair, and do justice on thee 
and cast thee down from heaven to earth, and yet 
again lift thee from earth to heaven, because men gave 
themselves to evil and unrighteous living. 

And Samos shall become a sand, Delos be deleted, 
and Rome a mere alley ; and all that is foretold shall be 

350-5. From the Mithridatic war of 88 B.c. ; a brief allusion to 
the same period is to be found in IV. 145-8. 

356-62. If this oracle against Rome is a continuation of the pre 
ceding lines, it must owe 362 at least to a Jewish reviser ; the moral 
reason for the downfall of Rome is by no means in the spirit of 
350-5- 

363 f. Old Hellenic material has been used here : cf. IV. 91 f. 
Geffck. quotes Callimachus, Hymns IV. 53 for Δήλοϊ &5n\os. The 
jingle about Samos seems to have no assignable meaning; but if 
the lines come from the time of the Mithridatic war it is worth 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 63 

fulfilled ; but none shall take account of the ruin of 365 
Smyrna. There shall be an avenger,·)· but through evil 
counsels and the cowardice of her captains . . . and 
calm peace shall make her way to the land of Asia : and 
Europe then shall be blessed, the air fruitful year after 
year, healthy, without frost and hail, bringing forth beasts 370 
and birds and creeping things of the earth. Blessed 
shall the man and woman be who lives to see that time,t 
as are they who dwell in the isles of the blest ; ffor law 
and justice shall come from the starry heaven upon men, 
and with them wise concord, best of all gifts for mortals, 
and love and faith and hospitable ways ; but lawlessness, 375 
blame, envy, anger and madness shall depart. Poverty 
and penury shall flee from men in those days, with 
murder and accursed strife and grievous wrangling, 
theft by night and every ill. · 3%° 

381-387. An oracle on Alexander. 
But Macedonia shall bring forth a grievous bane for 
Asia, and for Europe a great woe mature its fruit, from 

noticing that Delos was laid waste hy the sea-forces of Mithridates 
in 89 B.c. In 364 καί 'Ρύμη £ύμη is modelled on the assonances of 
363. Tertullian (De Pallia 2) quotes the line as a fulfilled prophecy : 
"intei insulas nulla iam Delos, harenoe Samos, et Sibylla non 
mendax." 

367 ff. The prophecy of peace upon Asia may belong to what 
precedes it, but the passage, from 371 onwards, has a Jewish or 
Christian rather than a Hellenic cast ; cf. 619 -23 infr. 

372. Cf. IV. 192. But the text ((««ήφατοι Άσαον &ypau\os) is very 
corrupt. Geffck. suggests an elaborately ingenious conjecture, 
which would make the line definitely Christian—μαχάρων κίν Uri 
φάτι* Sis iv αγρηύλοΐϊ—" it would be tidings of the blessed ones, 
as among the shepherds." 

381-7. An oracle on Alexander the Great : possibly from the 
Persian Sibyl. In Nicanor's Life of Alexander, quoted from Varrò 
by Lactantius (Inst. I. 6, 8), it was stated that this Sibyl foretold the 
career of Alexander—in no favourable terms, as it may be supposed. 
On the other hand, the Erythraean Sibyl acknowledged the divinity 
of Alexander. 

Γ IH 

 64 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

the sons of Kronos, a race of bastards and slaves. That 
race shall subdue the strong-built city of Babylon, and 
385 having been called mistress of every land which the sun 
looks on shall perish by an evil fate, and shall leave a 
name only to descendants scattered far and wide. 

388-400. On Antiochus Epiphanes (?). 

And to the happy shore of Asia shall come a man 
unheard of before,")" having a purple robe cast about his 

388-400. There are two textual difficulties which make it haid 
to provide any satisfactory interpretation here, (a) In 397 the M SS. 
have ira/ία δη (Se) φύτον &\\o φυτfύacι·, but in XI. 251, where parts 
of the passage reappear, the reading is πρίν δη κτλ. (b) In 399 
καυτό; αφ' uiâv ων is ύμιίφροι'α αίσιοι/ &ρρη5 is hopeless. Geffck. 
suggests υφ' miavSiV Iv όμαφροσύντίσιν "Aprjor. 

Three lines of interpretation may he mentioned—(i) Hilgenfeld 
took the " man" of 1. 389 to be Antiochus Epiphanes, who put an 
end to the family of his brother Seleucus IV. : while a son of 
Seleucus, Demetiius, killed Antiochus V., Eupator, the only de 
scendant of Ant. Epiphanes. The " other shoot" of 397 (following 
the reading of the MSS.) is Alexander Balas; the "warlike sire" 
of 398 is Demetrius I. ; the " sons " who make an end of Alex. Balas 
are Demetrius II. and Antiochus Sidetes, and the ' ' parasite horn " of 
400 is the usurper Tryphon. The difficulties in this theory are that 
it requires the φύτον of 397 to become the subject of κο'ψ*ι in the 
following line ; and that Antiochus Sidetes had, in fact, nothing to 
do with the downfall of Balas. (2) Gefifcken's solution (making the 
two textual changes mentioned above) connects the passage with 
Antiochus Cyzicenns and his struggles against his half-brother 
Grjpos and Grypos' sons. Cyzicenus would fain destroy the 
family of one whose sons are destined to destroy his own. He puts 
out one shoot, Antiochus Eusebes, whom Philip the descendant of 
ten kings, strikes down before another is planted ; and though he 
strikes down Grypos, he himself is the victim of Grypos' nephews. 

Here, again, two obstacles are met with ; for Cyzicenus, in fact, 
fell in battle against the Parthians : and, as Geffcken admits, uitavos 
does not mean "nephew " but "grandson." 

Thus neither (i) nor (2) can claim to be a consistent solution of 
the difficulty. As far as 1. 398 goes (a man unheard of before), one 
might think of Demetiius I., Antiochus Cyzicenus, or Antiochus 
Epiphanes with equal appropriateness, for each of these made a 
dramatic and sudden appearance in Asia ; but it may be doubted 
whether any other Seleucid than Antiochus Epiphanes can be 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 65 

shoulders, fierce, strange in judgement, fiery ; the thun- 390 
der was his sire : and all Asia shall pass under the yoke 
of oppression, and the earth shall drink and be drenched 
with streams of blood. Yet even so shall he pass utterly 
out of knowledge, and death shall have him in charge ; 
and they whose children he would fain destroy, by their 395 
children shall his line be destroyed ; putting out one 
root, which the Slayer of men shall cut off, from among 
ten heads, before it genders another shoot : he shall cut 
off the warlike sire of the race bred in the purple, and 
perish himself at the hands of his grandsons, f joined in a 
compact of war f ; and then a horn, an off-shoot, shall 400 
reign. 

401-488. Miscellaneous Hellenic Oracles. 

To fruitful Phrygia also shall a sign be given, when the 
foul race of Rhea, an ever-flowing wave, springing from 
roots in the earth never waterless, is utterly abolished in 405 
one night, in the city of Poseidon the earth-shaker, and 
with all its men, the city which they shall call Dorylaeum 

intended by 11. 388-391. The three epithets in 390 (the last half 
of the line, one may admit, is incomprehensible) can all be illus 
trated from ι Mace. i. ; and since the whole passage is partly based 
on Dan. vii. ff., which refers to the reign of Epiphanes, one might 
surmise that it is a picture, though an inaccurate one, of the same 
period. While, then, in its present obscure and corrupt form, 
it may well be considerably later than 175-164 B.c., it still belongs, 
in all probability, to the earliest Jewish stratum of the book. 

(3) Bousset (in Zeüschriftfürneutestamentlichc Wissenschaft, III., 
1902, pp. 23 ff. ) would partly support the above, holding that the 
passage was misunderstood and altered by the Jewish Sibyllist so 
as to make it applicable to a Seleucid king. But he believes that 
all the material comes from the Chaldsean ( = Persian) Sibyl, and 
that in its original foim it referred to Alexander the Great. He 
points out that "lightning gave him birth," Asia suffered a yoke, 
" the earth drank blood when he came " ; and identifies the " one 
root " of 396 with the son of Alexander and Roxane. 

401-413. On Phrygia : obscure and impossible to translate. 

 60 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

67 

by name, in ancient Phrygia, that dark and lamentable 
land. Until that time he who is called earth-shaker 
shall break open the store-houses of the earth and destroy 
410 fenced cities. But the signs shall be the beginning of 
evil and not of good. tThou(?) shall have for kings men 
skilled in war of nations, offspring of ^Eneas, native sons 
of Ilium, t But thereafter thou shall be a prey to men 
that are (thy) lovers. 

415 Ilium, I pity thee; for in Sparta an avenging fury 
shall grow up, a fair and goodly shoot of renown, to 
bring a spreading wave of ruin upon Europe and Asia : 
but to thee above all shall she bring lamentation, sorrow 
and groaning as thy portion ; and the fame of it shall not 
grow old among men that are yet to be. 

420 And an old man shall there be, a writer of falsehood, 
false to his country ; his eyes shall be sightless ; he will 
have a cunning mind, and words well fitting his thoughts 
(or, rhythm of verse to clothe his thoughts) blended of 
two names ; he shall call himself a man of Chios, and 
shall write the tale of Ilium, not truly, but with cunning, 

407. Dark (κ(\αι»ηι) : according to Wilamowitz this is an 
ancient oracle on Celaenie, transferred by the interpolation of 1. 406 
to Dorylseum. 

414-428. That the Erythnean Sibyl (or the Delphic) was earlier 
than or contemporary with the Trojan war, that she foretold it, and 
that Homer borrowed unscrupulously from her prophecies, was 
widely believed in antiquity. These lines appear to be the basi 
of the tradition. For the references in Varrò, Pausanias, etc., se 
Alexandre, II. 12 f, and App. to Exc. I. 

412. There is a trace here of the tradition that ^Eneas and his- 
descendants reigned in the Troad down to Homeric times : cf. 
Horn. //. 307 f. (νυν Se Sì} Alveino βΐη Ifaeaaiv àraf« /tal παίδων 
ircüSes κτλ), and Hdt. V. 122. 

414. a fury, i.e. Helen: cf. yEsch. Ag. 749; Eur. Or. 1390 
Verg. ^£«. ii. 573 ; Troise et patria Communis Erinys. 

422. twa names, i.e. Iliad and Odyssty. 

for he shall take my words and measures for his use, and 425 
be the first to open and handle my books. He shall 
bravely deck out the armed men of war, Hector son of 
Priam, Achilles son of Peleus, and the rest whose care is 
for the works of warfare. He will make the gods come 
to their aid, picturing them most falsely as witless mortals. 430 
And to them death at Ilium shall bring the greater fame : 
but he shall reap the reward of his own works. 

And for Lycia the race of Locrus shall breed much ill. 
Thee, Chalcedon, who boldest the passage of the narrow 
strait, shall a child of ^Etolia devastate at his coming. 435 

Cyzicus, from thee the sea shall break off the weight 
of thy wealth ; thou, Byzantium, shall choose to make 
war in Asiaf ; truly groaning and endless blood shall be 
thy portion. 

From thy peaks, Kragos, high mountain of Lycia, 440 
water shall gush out, when thy rocks split asunder, until 
it put an end to the oracular signs of Patara. 

Cyzicus, dweller on vine-clad Propontis, Rhyndacus 
shall dash his stream about thee in a swelling wave. 

And thou, Rhodes, for long shall thou keep thy 
freedom, thou short-lived daughter, and much wealth 445 
shall be thine hereafter, and in the sea thou shalt have 
power beyond others : yet thereafter shalt thou be a prey 
to men that are Ihy lovers, wilh thy wealth and beauty, 
and a heavy yoke shalt thou have set upon thy neck. 

432. reap : Wuamowitz1 conclusive emendation Sederai for MSS. 
λύεται. 

444 ff. A clue to these lines may perhaps be looked for in the 
events of 169 B.c. The Rhodians, after a century and a half of 
friendship with Rome, and a period of high commercial prosperity, 
were misled into siding against Rome in the middle of the war 
with Perseus ; and for this they were visited with crushing penalties 
at the end of the war. 

449· This line must refer to the Ionian revolt of 499 B.c., which 

ttll 

i Ι1!ί ·ϋ1)η·{}Η·1((ΐ'Ηί' 

 68 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

69 

A Lydian earthquake shall destroy the land of Persia, 

450 and bring horrible woes upon Europe and Asia, t The 
murderous king of Sidon, and the war-cry of strange sea 
farers, shall fall on the Samians, and they shall come to a 
fatal doom. The ground shall run with blood of the 
slain down to the sea; wives with their fair-robed 

455 daughters shall bewail their dishonour and shame, these 
weeping for their ·\ fathers, these for their sons. 

A sign upon Cyprus ; an earthquake shaking the troops 
in array, and many souls at once shall Hades receive. 
Tralles the neighbour of Ephesus — an earthquake 

460 shall destroy both the well-built walls and the wealth 
of a troubled people ; the earth shall spout up water 
boiling hot ; the groaning earth shall swallow them 
down, with a smell of brimstone. 

Samos too on a time shall build a royal palace. 
Upon thee, Italy, no warfare of foreign foes shall 

465 come, but civil bloodshed lamentable and of long con 
tinuance shall ravish thee, thou famous land, for thy 
shamelessness. And thou, stretched prone among the 
burning ashes, shall slay thyself, in thy improvident 
heart. Thou shall be no mother of good men, but a 
nurse of wild beasts. 

470 But when from Italy shall come a man of destruction, 
then thou, Laodicea, fair city of the Carians, by the 

began with the taking of Sardis, and was the prelude to the great 
struggle between Hellas and Persia. The following lines defy 
interpretation. 

464 ff. civil bloodshed: i.e. in the Social War, 91-89 B.c., or 
in the Sullan troubles. 

470. The " man of destruction " may be Sulla, and the time that 
of the Mithridatic war. Laodicea was often damaged by earth 
quakes : cf., IV. 107, V. 290 ; for references, and for the description 
of Laodicea as a Carian city, see Lightfoot, Colossians 38 note, 
18 note. The ' ' father " of the city is Zeus, the tutelary deity of the 
place, from whom its earlier name of Diospolis had been t?ken. 

wondrous water of Lycus, shall fall headlong and lament 
in silence thy proud-vaunting father. 

And the Thracian Krobyzi shall rise up on Haemus. 

The Campanians shall gnash their teelh for the famine 475 
that ravages their city, and for many a year (shall they 
lament their father). 

Corsica and Sardinia shall be sunk below the depths 
of the sea by great blasts of storm-winds, by the smiling 
of the holy god, a great wonder f for Ihe children of Ihe 
sea. Ah, for how many maidens shall death be their 480 
bridal, how many youths unburied shall toss in the 
deep: ah, for little children and great wealth, washed 
away by the sea ! 

Thou happy land of Mysia, thy royal house shall 
suddenly f pass away ; yet for no long lime shall Carthage 485 
(? Chalcedon) endure. Lamentable woe shall befall the 
Galatians : lo Tenedos the lasi of ills, bui Ihe grealesl 
shall come. 

Sicyon wilh brazen Irumpelings shall boasl her loudesl 
over Ihee, Corinlh ; bui the flute shall give back the 
same note in answer. 

Now when my soul had ceased from the hymn 
inspired, Ihen again did Ihe voice of Ihe great God rise 490 
in my breasl, bidding me prophesy over Ihe earlh. 

Woe lo the people of Phoenicia, men and women, 
and to all the ciliés of the coast ; not one of you shall 

483. The "royal House of Mysia" came to an end in 133 B.c., 
when the Romans took over the kingdom, which Attalus III. had 
bequeathed to them. 

487-8. An obscure reference to events connected with the down 
fall of Corinth in 146 B.C. In that year the Corinthian territory 
was put under Sicyon. The end of 488 is inexplicable, but has 
a flavour of antiquity. 

492-503. A Jewish oracle against Phœnicia, in the spirit of Isaiah 
xxiii., Jer. xlvii., Ezek. xxvi-xxviii. ; possibly reflecting the anti- 

•6! 

1 

 70 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

495 remain in the light of the sun, the common day, nor 
shall any be numbered among the living, nor any tribe 
survive, by reason of their unrighteous speech, their 
lawless and unholy life, which they all led, opening 
unholy lips ; and dreadful words, false and wicked did 
they spread abroad, and stood up against the great king, 

500 even God, and opened their mouths foully to speak 
falsehood. Therefore He shall bring them down with 
awful visitations over all the earth, and shall send them 
a bitter doom, burning their cities and their foundations 
down to the ground. 

Woe to thee, Crete, isle of sorrows : a blow shall fall 

505 on thee and a dread eternal destruction, and the whole 
earth shall see thy smoke going up ; fire shall not cease 
from thee for ever, but thou shall be burnt. 

Woe to thee, Thrace : thou shall bear the yoke of 
slavery, when the Galatians joined to the men of Dar- 

510 dania shall ravage Hellas in their onset : then it shall 
go ill with thee : thou shall give t to a foreign land and 
take nothing. 

Woe to thee, Gog, and to all the people of Magog 
thereafter ... t for all the evil that Fate brings upon 
thee from Mardians and Drangians f and much evil to 

515 the children of Lycia, Mysia, and Phrygia ; many tribes 
of Pamphylians, Lydians, Morians.f Ethiopians, and bar 
barous peoples, Cappadocians and Arabians shall fall ; 
why tell of each thing in order ? for to all nations that 

Philistine sentiment of the Maccabean period, and (502 f.) such 
episodes as the burning of Azotus and Gaza by Jonathan (i Mace, 
x. 84, xi. 61). 

508 ff. Referred by Geffck. to a war waged by Eumenes of Per- 
ganuim against Macedonia with the aid of Gaulish auxiliaries in 
168 B.c. 

513. Geffck. thus amends the unintelligible μάραων tjS' &γγαν 
(ίάγωι/) of the MSS. Marxians and Drangians \vere both Persian 
tribes. 

'<<·.:!.tiii'il,l?:r,r;.; i: r 

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 71 

dwell on the earth shall the most High send a dread 
stroke of calamity. 

520-572. The misery of Hellas under Roman 

domination. 

But when once more a barbarian host comes against S2° 
Hellas, it shall destroy many chosen men ; and many 
fat flocks shall they ravage, herds of horses, mules and 
lowing oxen; strongly-built houses will they burn with fire 
without scruple, and many will they carry away as slaves 525 
to a strange land, children and deep-girdled women, 
tender ones taken from their chambers, who before 
walked (or, could scarce stand) on delicate feet; they 
shall see them bound and suffering utmost shame at the 
hands of barbarous foes, nor shall there be any to aid 530 
them in the stress of war, and to rescue them alive. 
They shall see the enemy making a spoil of their goods 
and all their wealth: their knees shall tremble. A 
hundred shall flee, and one shall slay the hundred ; five 
shall stir up heavy wrath ; and they that join against 535 
them in shameful war and dread din of battle shall bring 
joy to the foe but sorrow to Hellas. 

The yoke of slavery shall be on the neck of all 
Hellas ; and on all men together war and pestilence 
shall be laid : and God shall make the whole heaven as 
brass above, and send drought upon the whole earth, S4<> 
and it shall be as iron. Then will men all lament sore 
for the failure of seed-time and ploughing ; and He who 

520 ff. Whether all this refers lo the Achaean war, and the sack 
of Corinth in 146 B.c., or to the horrors of Sulla's campaigns in 
Greece, it is impossible to determine. 

527. on delicate feet : cf. Deut, xxviii. 56. 

533- Cf. Isaiah xxx. 17, Deut. xxxii. 30. 

539. Cf. Deut, xxviii. 23, 24 ; IV. (Π.) Esdr. vi. 22, also 647 
infr., V. 276. 

 72 THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES 

made heaven and earth shall kindle grievous fire upon 
earth,f and but the third part of all mankind shall be 
left. 

545 O Hellas, why trustest thou for leadership in mortal 
men, who cannot escape the end of death ? Why dost 
thou offer vain gifts to the dead, and do sacrifice to 
idols? Who put this error in thy heart, to do these 
things and to forsake the face of the great God? 
550 Revere the name of the Father of all, and forget it not. 
A thousand years and five hundred more have passed 
since proud kings began to reign over Hellas, who led 
men in the first steps of evil, setting up many idols of 
555 dead gods, whereby ye were led to think vain thoughts. 
But when the wrath of the great God falls upon you, 
then shall ye know the face of the great God, and all 
souls of men, deeply wailing, holding up their hands 
563 to the broad heaven, shall begin to call upon the great 
King as their helper, and to seek who shall save them 
from the great wrath. 

Come, learn this and have it in mind, all the woes 

that shall come as year follows year . . . fand when 

565 thou offerest herds of oxen and lowing bulls at the 

temple of the great God, making a whole burnt-offering, 

544. Cf. Zech. xiii. 8. 

551. In 822 ff. the Sibyl is contemporary with the flood ; the 
writer of this passage dates himself as livi