United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What a strange figure she made against this strange background, with her quiet, chilly, self-contained manner, her pale face, so sad and worn, her black, straight brows and solemn grey eyes, so inscrutable, mysterious, Sibylline. A striking, even impressive, personality this, I reflected, with something in it sombre and enigmatic that attracted and yet repelled.
These priesthoods were: first the Augurs, with their traditional right to break up assemblies and to declare legislative action null and void; then the Pontiffs, with their general control of all vexed questions concerning the intersection of divine and human law; and lastly the XVviri, or the keepers of the Sibylline books, in charge also of the cults to which the oracles had given birth.
The languid, musical pageant of my youth streamed toward me again through the leafy aisles, and I remembered my high aspirings, my poems, my ideals: the floating vision of a Dark Ladye passed or looked up at me through the broken waves of Oblivion; she listened to my rhapsodies with the old puzzling silence; she confided to me certain Sibylline leaves out of her diary; then she receded, cold and unresponsive, a statue cut out of a shadow.
The armies being disbanded, whilst there was both peace abroad, and tranquillity at home by reason of the concord of the different orders, lest matters might be too happy, a pestilence having attacked the state, compelled the senate to order the decemvirs to inspect the Sibylline books, and by their suggestion a lectisternium took place.
He ran swiftly across the path to remove the inefficient camera from the foreground, and in a moment was seated on a log by the wayside, his quick eye scanning the scene: the close file of the ranges about the horizon, one showing above another, and one more faintly blue than another, for thus the distance was defined; then the amphitheatre of the Cove, the heavy bronze-green slopes of the mountains, all with ripple marks of clear chrome-green ruffling in the wake of the wind; in the middle distance the still depths of the valley below, with shadows all a-slumber and silent, and on the projecting spur the quiet, lonely little house, so slight a suggestion of the presence of man amidst the majestic dominance of nature; here, to the right, across the savage gorge, with its cliffs and with its currents in the deep trough, the nearest slope of the mountain, with the great gaunt bare space showing that face of ill omen, sibylline, sinister, definite indeed, he wondered how his eyes were holden that he should not have discerned it at once; and in the immediate foreground the equestrian figure of the mountaineer, booted and spurred, the very "moral," as Hite would have called it, of an athlete, with his fine erect pose distinct against the hazy perspective, his expression of confident force, the details of his handsome features revealed by the brim of his wide black hat turned up in front.
This increased interest in trade in general and this inceptive interest in those who "go down to the sea in ships" have both of them left their reflexion in the religious life of the time; two new deities are introduced, both of them almost certainly by means of the Sibylline oracles, though some accidental blanks in our historical tradition have deprived us of details.
The carrying out of these actions was again in the charge of the Sibylline priests, who performed the ceremonies demanded and were for all time to come responsible for the maintenance of any new cults which might be introduced.
The force of religion was so great among our ancestors that some of their commanders have, with their faces veiled, and with the solemn, formal expressions of religion, sacrificed themselves to the immortal Gods to save their country. I could mention many of the Sibylline prophecies, and many answers of the haruspices, to confirm those things, which ought not to be doubted.
"I marvel, Conscript Fathers, that ye have so much misgiving about opening the Sibylline books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly of Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. . . . Let inquiry be made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled.
He points to the excellence of the Jewish conception of marriage, another commonplace of the Hellenistic apologist, as we know from the Sibylline oracles; to the respect for parents and to the friendliness for the stranger. He insists with Philo that kinship is to be measured not by blood, but by the conduct of life.
Word Of The Day