•This goes back to the Sibyllinist of bk. v., where (12f.) Augustus is the man 'who has the first of letters* (A), Nero the man whose initial letter is fifty (N = f)0). and so forth.
t The ditliculty raised by the abrupt allusion in 812 to an army of Sicilians is solved, according to Scott, by reading 5'ck K(AiKai»' for 57J SiKfAdic, and assuming that lieradius started his expedition against Kgypt in li'J(I-l)27 from Cilicia, where he had won a footing in (i2.'i. Wirth prefers to think of the slave- wars in Sicily towards the end of the reign of Qallieuus, and Alexandre conjectured tKvOitv.
490
SIBYLLINE OKACLES
SICKLE
or less serious attempt to echo Homer. Tlie Homeric phrases and tags are not confined to the earliest books. Tliey appear in oracles from the 3rd and 6tli Christian centuries. To some extent, tliej' are probably indirect, but the use of Homeric pliraseology as well as metre was evidently a con- vention.* The history of literature shows that true poetry need not be stifled by the conventional forms of its age ; but whenever the genuine breath of inspiration begins to ebb conventions are borne less lightly, and it is only in one or two books of the Sibi/Uina th.at the Homeric conventions are almost forgotten by the reader in the sheer interest of the oracles. It should be recollected, however, that their interest would be greater for their original public, just because they were circulated as separ- ate pieces. A modern reader has the collected mass before him, and the juxtaposition of good, poor, and indifferent prevents him from appreciating the occasional flashes of genuine pathos and stem power which lighten up the surrounding mists.
(b) To a certain extent, also, there is a general point of view, which survives in spite of the difi'er- ent historical and religious situations. The cos- mology is fairly uniform in outline if not in details, and even the theology, apart from the dehnitely Christian touehes,t has a character of its own. This is particularly true of the eschatology, for, although one oracle will be more Messianic (in the personal sense of the term) than another, although the Jewish sections tend to view the consummation as a prolonged reign of the holy nation on earth, while the Christian Sibyllinists lay more stress on the catastrophe of the Last Judgment, yet these and other variations do not obliterate the large common features which the Sibyllina shared with apocaljqjtie — calculations about the near end, the conditions of the Judgment, the expectation of Nero's return, and so forth. Here, as in the the- ology, there must have been a tradition, partly alcin to Orpliism and Stoicism, to which every Sibjd- linist felt bound to conform in the main, however well-marked his idiosyncrasies might be. It is the same in the political aspect. One oracle will favour Hadrian, for example, more than another, but it is impossible as a rule to mistake the unswerving antipathy to Kome in the later Sibyllina, where it succeeds to the r61e of Syria in the earlier, iiev! and Christian were generally at one on this point, when they composed Sibyllina. Their reasons might vary, and there might be differences in the degree of tlieir bitterness, but the Roman Empire stood out as the last enemy to be conquered by, or rather for, the just. The rivalry of East and West, which cliaracterized ancient history, was to be decided in favour of the East. This again was a feature which the Sibyllina shared with their allied literary product, the apocalypses. Upon the whole, we may contend that, while those who endeavour to identify the historical situations of the various Sibylline oracles are right in feeling that the ars nesciendi forms an unusually important part of the Investigator's equipment, nevertheless, standing back from the details, we are able to gain a fairly broad and accurate impression of their general spirit and characteristics. J
Tlie amazing developments of the Sibj'lline myth in Byzantine and mediaeval literature do not con- cern us here, as they were practically independent of our Sibylline collection and subsequent to it. It
* It was an instance of what Rendel Harris (The Homeric Centones, p. 3) calls 'the multiform witchcraft of Homer over the human race.' He shows (p. 13 f.) how the Sibyllina took Homer more seriously than the Centones.
t Which are moulded, as a rule, on a t.^^pe of their own.
J The Swedish scholar, E. Fehr, has published an excellent mono^'raph on these characteristics {Studio, in Oracula Sibj/llina, Upsala, 1893).
was the 9th cent. Byzantine chronicler, Georgios Monachos (Hamartolos), for example, who appar- ently started the idea that the biblical queen of Sheba could be converted into a Sibyl (.see the essay byS. Krauss in the Ilyzrintiiti^rhe Zeitschrift, xi. 120-131), a notion which proved the germ of some curious growths in medi;cval legend. The companion tradition of the Tiburtine Sibyl (cf. EEE i. 5S0*) does appear to run back to the 4th century. Like the exploitation of Vergil's eclogue as a Messianic prophecy,* it was one of several streams which flowed from almost the same soil as our Sibylline oracles, but the latter went their own way, and, if we are able to follow that way, even diinl}', it is thanks to the Byzantine Christian who, in the 6th cent., cut the rough channel along which they have flowed down to us through the ramifications of early and mediaeval oracular litera- ture.