Tuesday 17 July 2018

In Sibyl's Cave



Deep in the face of that Euboean crag
A cavern vast is hollowed out amain,
With hundred openings, a hundred mouths,
Whence voices flow, the Sibyl's answering songs.
While at the door they paused, the virgin cried :
“Ask now thy doom!—the god! the god is nigh!”
So saying, from her face its color flew,
Her twisted locks flowed free, the heaving breast
Swelled with her heart's wild blood; her stature seemed
Vaster, her accent more than mortal man,
As all th' oncoming god around her breathed :
“On with thy vows and prayers, 0 Trojan, on!
For only unto prayer this haunted cave
May its vast lips unclose.” She spake no more.

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 6, translated by John Dryden
The core of this picture is one of several busts I photographed in the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg (a delightful place, incidentally, and clearly very popular with the locals for a shady Sunday stroll in hot weather). When I started to play around with it, it seemed to want to lead me in certain directions, and I ended up inside this imaginary cave twinkling with watery reflections. I had genuinely forgotten (if I ever bothered to notice) who or what the bust represented, but when I decided to check, I found to my surprise that it is, in fact, a sibyl. The Erythraean Sibyl, to be exact, and not the Cumaean Sibyl (the one that Aeneas consults before descending into the underworld), but still very appropriate. I suppose my subconscious must somehow have noted the identity [1], and encouraged me to go with it. Although, as I have taken care to point out several times, I am no classicist, and I'm afraid to say that the name "Sybil", for me, primarily evokes Fawlty Towers, and not any cave-dwelling fortune-tellers.

There do seem to have been quite a few sibyls and practitioners of allied oracular trades hanging out around the Mediterranean; I suppose it must have been quite a good racket, sitting around inhaling the vision-inducing gases, and dispensing cryptic ambiguities to superstitious alpha males. Although sitting perched on a tripod does sound distinctly precarious, unless it was more by way of a bar-stool ("Of all the ethylene joints in all the caves in all the world..."). It's been interesting, though, reading up on the sibylline lore. I had no idea that the word "acrostic" was originally applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, for example, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves formed a word, in a kind of oracular Scrabble. I wonder how often the word was some appropriately offensive reference to the gullible recipient?

This will not be news to any proper classicists out there, but I was very taken by the story of how the Cumaean Sibyl marketed her books of prophesies to the last Roman king, Tarquinius: it's become a true classic of bookselling technique, used by publishers' reps everywhere. Apparently, she offered Tarquinius a set of nine books of prophecies at a ridiculously high price, but the king turned her down. So, she burned three of them, right there, and offered the remaining six to Tarquinius, still at the same crazy price. Again, he refused. So, she burned another three. Just three left, now; but, to you, sir, still at that same high price. Anyone got any more matches? Tarquinius, the superstitious alpha male, panicked: who knew what useful prophesies might be lurking in those pages [2]? So he bought the remaining three at the full, original price and, over the centuries, they were resorted to whenever some intractable problem presented itself. Plague? Floods? Catastrophic military defeat? Break out the Sibylline Books!

The solutions offered by the books do seem distinctly odd, however, such as when in 216 BC Hannibal annihilated the Roman army at the Battle of Cannae. The books were consulted, and as a consequence, two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in the forum. Um, sorted... Maybe. But that's what happens when you entrust the nation's fate to the ravings of some gas-happy soothsayer. Although the real problem may have been the failure to invest in the complete set of such an invaluable part-work. As anyone will attest who has bought into the cumulative monthly issues of, say, The Wacky World Encyclopaedia of Prophesy, the best bits are generally in the early volumes, and the contents of the last few gets progressively thinner and less reliably sourced. And I bet Tarquinius didn't even get the binders or the index.

Summer Gardens

 1. Though what it would have made of "Сивилла Эритрейская" (Sibilla Eritreiskaya) I'm not sure: it's hard to imagine why or how the Ancient Greeks would have consulted a sibyl located in Eritrea.
2. I haven't checked whether the Sibylline Books were actual books, as such, or – heh – more of a loose-leaf affair.

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