It is a question, says Gell'cken, whether bk. xi. or bk. xiv. is the worst of the Sibylline oracles. The latter is at any rate later, written by a Jew who probably lived in Egypt. It opens with a lament and warning on the passion for power and tyranny (1-11), and then passes into an enigmatic, confused series of Eastern chronicles, under tlie di.sguise of prophecy, of Roman generals and Emperors who are hardly to be identified, closing (280-283) with a prediction that the race of Latin Emperors is to be replaced by a permanent (dird- Xeirros ; cf. He 12'-") generation whose reign is the reijjn of God. The rest of the book is an oracle on Egypt (284-361), which is almost unintelligible. It is not possible here to do more than call atten- tion to two attempts to bring order out of chaos in this conglomerate of oracles. The first is by A. Wirth ( VViencr Studien, xiv. 35 f. ), who ingeniously traces the Roman Emperors from Caesar to the close of the 3rd century. One of the chief dilli- culties in identifying them is that the Sibyllinist as usual never names them ; he gives each a number, which is intended to mark the initial letter of his name, each letter of the Greek alphabet
* In 46-49 the Sibyl predicts that Alexandria will supply Rome with corn for as many years as her name stands for (i.e. RoMft = 948). Professor Scott (see Literature below) points out a remarkable coincidence in connexion with this. Chosroes the Persian leader conquered in Ef<ypt in a.d. 617. Now 948 years reckoned back from this date brings us to 332 B.C., the year in which Alexandria was founded. If this was in the Sibyllinist's mind, he must have written this fragment after (J17 (Scott thinks he was the man who also wrote xiv. 2S4 f., which describes the conijuest of Egypt by the Persians), and tlie fragment was in.serled in bk. viii. at this point, becjiuse in the preceding lines (38-4.5) it is prophesied that, so long as Alex- andria exported corn to Rome, the Persians never would conquer that city. The original Sibyllinist of the 7th cent., of course, expected, on the strength of this prophecy, that the Persians would succeed in conquering Rome.
t An even more exa.sperating trick is to hint at the first letter^s), by wa.v of assurance. E.ij. the Sibyllinist in xi. 23-24, wishing to describe Pharaoh, reminds the reader of ' Phasgana ' 1
being valued numerically as on the well-known luinciples of the cryptic (lematria whidi apoca- ivptic had found so useful.* Thus, according to V\irth, the man of 'eighty' (in 227) is Probus. Wirth rightly sees that the book cannot be earlier than the 3rd cent. A.D., but this hypothesis re- quires several data, to be forced, and it involves some fanciful reconstruction alike of the text and of the history. Ewald, long ago, had felt tliat the oracle rcllccted a much later period, in the 7tli cent., and this position has been worked out afresh by W. Scott in an elaborate, ingenious series of papers in The Classind Quarterly, ix. [1915] 144- 166, 207-228. He attempts skilfully to illustrate the details of the oracle from the struggle between Rome and Persia for Egyjit during the lirst half of the 7th century. According to this interpretation, the Siliyl sympathizes strongly with the opponents of Rome ; the two campaigns of the Persians in A.D. 6I4-G17 and of the Arabs in 639-641, especially the latter, lie behind the Egyptian oracle of this book, which regards the Roman re-occupation between the two conquests from the East as an unwelcome and oppressive epoch. Every defeat of the Romans, in the struggle that swayed over the possession of Alexandria, is hailed as Divine vengeance on the Empire for what the Jews of Egypt had sufl'ered. This interpretation t resets Ewald's general view in the light of recent research upon the Arab conquest of Egyjit, and, so far as sense can be made out of an oracle which is often little better than gibberish, it clears up more ob- scurities than the rival tlieories, which do not go further down than the 3rd or 4th century. On this hypothesi-s, of course, the fourteenth book must have been added to the collection after the prologue was written. This is not improbable, in the nature of the case, and it is not even out of keeping with the extant condition of the text, for the fourteenth book ends abruptly, whereas the thirteenth closes with the refrain of the eleventh, the Sibyl pleading exhaustion and begging for a cessation of her poetic and prophetic rhapsody.
Our gratitude to tlie unknown Uyzantine Chris- tian who put the Sihi/llina together in this collec- tion is tempered by the impression of carelessness, ignorance, and caprice which mark his editorial efforts. It is true that he did bis work for the purpose of edifying pious Christians, and not for the benefit of critical students. It is also true that the roughnesses and obscurities of the text may be partly set down to later scribes. Dut it was the editor who must have cut up oracles ruthlessly in order to make them fit ; he must have omitted sections and thus broken the continuity of many passages, and evidently he knew little or nothing about the origin and sense of several of the oracles which he collected. The result is ch.-ios frequently. The materials are often obscure in themselves, and their setting rarely makes them more intelligible. Oracles lie side by side which difier utterly in aim and date. Fragments from varicnis centuries are scattered over the entire collection, and even the so-called 'books' are hardly ever homogeneous. At the same time, under this incongruity and con- fusion of the Sihylllna there is n. certain unity not only of form but of spirit, (a) The formal unity is more than the adherence to the hexameter. As Rzach's ap|iendix to his edition of the Sibijllina (pp. 240-314) shows, every Sibyllinist made a more