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Updated: June 8, 2025
An index of the universality of the sibylline cult appears in the list of races to which Varro and Lactantius say they belonged: Persian, Libyan, Delphian, Cimmerian, Erythrian, Trojan, and Phrygian. These sibyls were believed to be inspired, and generations of Greek and Roman philosophers never doubted their power.
When the father became the acknowledged head of the household, a distinct advance was made toward that heroic age in which the vague but towering figures of men and women move across the stage. Goddesses, queens, princesses, are powerful in love and war. Sibyls unfold the meaning of the book of fate. Vestals feed the fires upon the highest and lowest altars.
They were kept in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, preserved in a stone chest, and allowed to be inspected only by especial officers appointed for that duty, who on great occasions consulted them and interpreted their oracles to the people. There were various Sibyls; but the Cumaean Sibyl, of whom Ovid and Virgil write, is the most celebrated of them.
There was another picture that made a sensation in that year's Academy; it was the work of an unknown artist, Cecil Farquhar by name, and was noted in the catalogue as The Daughters of Philip. It represented the "four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy" of Philip of Cæsarea; but it did not set them forth in the dress and attitude of inspired sibyls.
Have you no learned puzzle-brained metaphysicians who tell you that space is but an idea, all this palpable universe an idea in the mind, and no more? Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyls, and your metaphysicians as plain as a hornbook?" Again the sardonic laugh.
Other writers considerably reduce this number, three being that most usually accepted, and Salmasius, the most learned man that ever lived, summed up the various theories concerning these mysterious beings with the words: "There is nothing on which ancient writers more widely differ than as to the age, number, and country of the Sibyls."
Had Michelangelo ended at a line drawn halfway across the breadth of the vault, leaving the Prophets and Sibyls, the lunettes and pendentives, all finished so far, it would have been a piece of monstrous impudence even in Bramante, and an impossible discourtesy in gentle Raffaello, to have begged for leave to carry on a scheme so marvellously planned.
'Lilly, thou art herein, says he. 'Are not you there also? I replied. 'Yes, that I am, quoth he. The words concerning me were these: From th' oracles of the Sibyls so silly, The curst predictions of William Lilly, And Dr. Sybbald's Shoe-lane Philly, Good Lord, deliver me.
And between the windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls man and woman deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual expression.
Other crypts were discovered, but these had evidently been spoliated. Before quitting these mausoleums and their exquisite possessions of pleureuses, geniuses, Sibyls, and the rest, it may be worth while to remind the reader that, according to the most learned of the Romans, there were ten Sibyls, viz.: 1. Persica, 2. Libyssa, 3. Delphica, 4. Cumaea, 5. Erythraea, 6. Samia, 7.
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