• Mendelssohn happily conjectures xriaiv for the irrelevant icptVtv of the MSS, here and in '2GS».
t According to Augustine, the Sibyl and Job are the two pre- Christian personalities who can be reckoned as classical ex- amples of membership in God's City (xviii. 'I'i and 47).
; The earlier Sibylline proofs {e.fj. in iv. 193 f.) were in the mind of Justin when he wrote (Apof. i, 20) that ' the Sibyl and Ilystaspes certify that corruptible things ore to be dissolved by fire ' (cf. Mayor's note on 2 P 3").
5 The * monstrous regiment of women ' is for the Sibyllijies an invariable prelude of disaster ; the idea is historically applied to
488
SIBYLLINE OKACLES
SIBYLLINE ORACLES
the Uomiuis is God's punishment for her treatment of Israel (SOTff'.)- She starts from tlie Fhxxl and the Tower of liabel, surveys the ancient monarchies, and ends, as she bej;ins, with Egyiit. The stand- point is Jewish, but tliis does not necessarily imply that the author was a Jew, althou^di it must be admitted that there are no distinctively Chris- tian touches in the oracles. They are practically devoid of religious interest. The Sib3'l takes occasion to repeat (163 f.; see bk. iii. 419-426) * her charj^e against Homer, after telling the fate of Troy:
* And again there shall be a wise old man of song, whom a'l dub wisest among men. Plainly shall he set down things quite unspeakable, having gained possession of my words, my measures, and my
verses ; he first shall unfold my books and then hide them, and show them to men no more.'
The pre-Horaeric Sibyl thus claims to have furnished Homer with the materials for his epic, which he took over without acknowledgment and then suppressed. This is intended, of course, to account for two features in the Sibylline oracles, the fact of their late publication and the hexa- meter metre. The former fact was explained on the same lines as the late publication of apocalypses which professed to have been written by men of the far past ; they remained unknown for long, because they had been hidden purposely either by the author or by others, for various reasons. The Sibyllinist does not hesitate to blacken Homer's character, in order to establish the good faith of the Sibyl herself. Otherwise, the only feature of interest in the book is the repeated use made of the third book. The very asseveration of her veracity as an interpreter of the Divine counsel, with which she closes as she opens the oracle, echoes the open- ing lines of the third book. Only, she feels t that her predictions are to be ridiculed and her warnings ignored (314 f.). So she will retire J to the shrine of A polio, where she is regarded as a true, ecstatic prophetess. The time will come when the hearers of this present oracle will have to admit that she was no deceiver.
The data for calculating the date of the piece are exceptionally few and vague. There is an apparent reference to the extent of the Roman Empire in lines 160-161 ; but the reading varies, and, while one critic deduces from the language § that the author wrote between A.D. 115 and 118, another is equally confident that the Sibyllinist must have survived the overthrow of the Parthian kingdom in A.D. 226. All that is certain is that the terminus a quo for the conxposition of the main part of the book is the overthrow of Cleopatra by the Romans.
Berenice m. in 81 B.o. (xi. 246 f.), and then to Cleopatra (cf. viii. 199 f., iii. 75 f.). Bonsset (Antichrist Legend, London, 1896, p. 99 f.) sees behind this a conception of the marine anti-divine monster as feminine.
* In a private communication, Professor Walter Scott points out that tliese passages from bks. iii. and xi. probably imjily that this author knew the pagan oracles of the Trojan War to which Pausanias alludes (see above, p. 478). The com- plaint of the Sibyl against Homer belonged to pagan tradition ; it was not invented by Jews or Christians. Varro (as reported by Lactantius, Div. Inst. i. 6. 9) tells tliat the Erythrajan Sibyl ■Graiis Ilium petentibus vaticinatam et perituram esse Troiam et Homerum mendacia scripturum.'
t This Cassandra-like touch goes back to the pagan tradition.
t Sibyls were not always stationary. Some would wander abroad, like the Babylonian (iii. 809 f.) or the Erythraean. This reflects either a primitive tradition that the Sibyls roamed on their mission to the discerning on earth or an etiological explanation of the widespread traces of Sibylline oracles.
§ The Sibyl's trick of punning continues, e.g., in 236 (koI rore ^le^Ji^4a^<>i Me^-^ts). She had caught it from the pagan oracles of her tribe, e.g. the famous (iii. 363-364)_
etrrai Kai. Sa^09 ajajuo;, ecretTcu a5))Ao9, ical 'Poi/ivj pv/jiri.
But the OT instances paved the way for ita usage among Hellen- istic Judaists.
[L.
Since Lightfoot wrote {Apostolic Fathers, pt. ii.' fOndon, 1889]: 'Ignatius and Polycarp,' vol. i. p. C42f.), it has been custom;iry to accept bks. xi.-xiv. as a continuous prophecy, which sum- marizes the history of the world from the Flood down to the end of the 3rd cent. A.D. at the earliest. Hut even so, it is not a unity. The contents have been increased and altered from time to time by successive hands, and data of style and language place bks. xii. and xiii. by themselves as superior to the other two. Unfortunately, even in the case of the latter, the text is extremely corrupt, and the historical allusions* are often ambiguous.