t Adam and Eve. i Cf. Bev lia
486
SIBYLLINE ORACLES
SIBYLLINE ORACLES
O cross,* most blessed wood, on which God wjis stretched out, earth shall no longer hold thee, thou Shalt see heaven thy
home, when God's bright Light flashes forth afresh.'
The text of bk. vii. is broken at several places, and the uonlents are niisLt'llaneous, but the bulk seems to be of .lewish Christian origin ; there are Gnostic touches [e.g. in l.'J'JII'.), which indicate a soil in the 2nd or 3rd cent, similar to that of bk. vi. The book, however, is such a cou{;loinerate of fragments that it delies any general estimate. A brief woe on Rhodes, Delos, Cyprus, and Sicily is abruptly followed by a reference to Noah, and a prediction of the final deluge, as follows (9-23) : t
' The earth shall float, the hills shall float, the very air (heaven)
shull float. all thin^^s sliall be water, and by water shall all things be
dcstroytjd ; the winds shall be stayed, and a second aire shall begin. O Phr\ ;,aa, tliou alialt first emerge from the top of the water, thou first shaft impiously deny thy God, delighting thyself in idols dumb, in idols that shall be thy
ruin, 0 wretched one, when many years have run their course. The luckless Ethiopians, who suffer piteous pangs, shall be struck down by the sword, as they stoop and bend. Fair Egypt, ever blessed with corn, watered by the seven flowing streams of the Nile, shall be ruined by strife and faction ; whereupon, in despair, men shall drive out Apis — no god for men ! Woe to thee, Laodicea,! who never hast God beheld, thou Shalt be beguiled, thou proud one ; the Lycus will flood
thee over.'
The following fragments are Messianic (24 f.), historical denunciations § (40 f.), and woes on Troy, Colophon, Coiinth, and Tyre, as well as on Crele- Syria (64 f.) tor its inditlerence to the Logos- Messiah (line 84 echoing the thought of the fire at Christ's baptism, in vi. 6). Then comes a group of oracles, apparently taken from sotne older collec- tion, against Sardinia, Celtiberia, Mygdonia, Rome, Syria, and Thebes (96-117). The terrors which precede the Messianic Age are described (118-149), with a brief picture of the new order of things on lines familiar to us from apocalyptic traditions preserved in Papias, and Iren;eus, and elsewhere. Lactantius quotes {Div. Inst. vii. 16. 13) from this fragment ( 123). It may be conjectured with some certainty that here as elsewhere the short, pithy oracles of doom and warning addressed to places in which neither a Jewish nor a Christian Sibyllinist would feel any direct interest origin- all}' belonged to some collection of piagan pro- phecies. Often they stand in an extremely loose connexion \vith each other, or with their general context. We may suppose that they were retained, partlj' tolend vraiscmhlance to the new composition, partly for the sake of some local importance which is lost to us. II
The close of the book is singular (150 f.), for,
• One of the first allusions to the cult of the Cross, in its legendary development (cf. ERE iv. 328). Sozomen remembers to quote this line in his 5th cent, history (ii. 1), when telling the romantic story of liow Queen Helena found the genuine Cross of Jesus at Jerusalem. He protests against any sce])tical surprise, on the ground that 'even among the Greeks tins Sibylhne view was admitted ; " O most blessed wood, on which God was stretched out." Our most ardent opponents would not deny this, so that the wood of the Cross and the reverence paid to it are clearly proved to have been foreshadowed.'
t 9-13 are almost verbally equivalent to i. 193-196.
t Laodicea is frequently doomed in the Sihyllina. — usually to destruction by an earthquake (e.g. iii. 471-472, iv. 107-103, v. 290-291, xii. 280-281), however.
§ The habit of threatening and denouncing grew as the Sibyliina went on. The severe tone had been characteristic of the pagan Sibyl, and, as Bouch6-Leclercq observes {op. cit., p. 202), it sounded still more loudly in the Jewish oracles. * La Sibylle . . . ne salt gufere menacer sans maudire.'
II Zosimus, the Greek historian of the 5th cent., preserves a fragment of 37 lines (ii. 5) which give directions for the proper celebration of the 'ludi seculares.' This was a pagan oracle which Christiana would naturally ignore, and it is therefore absent from our collection. It is possibly the sort of 'Sibyllini versus ' mentioned by Horace in his Cannen Seculare (pt. iv. line 6).
after describing the bliss of men upon the new earth, the Sibyl utters an apologia and plea for herself as a pagan, which goes beyond the similar cry in bk. ii. (see above, p. 4S4). She confesses that she has sinned lioth wilfully and carelessly, ami has despised marriage {i.e. as the context here .seems to imply, ' indulged in sexual vice '). For all this, she is to die, and burn in hell-fire, when men on earth have stoned and buried her. But appar- ently— for the text is mangled and dim — slie hopes for deliverance, when God instructs her and raises her to life in heaven. We have here the Christian Sibyllinist conscious of the drawbacks attaching to his pagan mouth]iiece, and endeavouring to adjust her character to the new setting. It is not enough to put jiredictions and statements of Christian doctrine in the mouth of a pagan Sibyl of the far past ; she must be made to repent of her errors and be Christianized at the end.