Varro's ten Sibyls, prophetesses of the ancient world

The name Sibyl did not originally refer to a single person. Ancient authors speak of several inspired prophetesses, living in distant places and times, who uttered oracles without being tied to a specific sanctuary like the Pythia. Over time the Sibyls multiplied, and their figure passed from the Greek world to the Roman and then to the Christian, until it found its way into Renaissance frescoes.

The oldest voice

The earliest testimony about the Sibyl is a fragment of the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived between the sixth and fifth centuries BC, preserved by Plutarch. It says that the Sibyl, with raving mouth, utters words without laughter, without adornment and without perfume, and that her voice reaches across a thousand years thanks to the god. It is already the portrait of an austere and solitary prophetess, whose word survives for a long time.

In the fourth century BC Plato mentions the Sibyl beside the Pythia and the priestesses of Dodona as an example of inspired prophecy, one of the forms of divine madness described in the Phaedrus. From then on the figure became a permanent part of Greek culture, and several cities claimed to be the birthplace of a Sibyl.

Varro's list

The Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, in the first century BC, compiled a list of ten Sibyls that we know thanks to Lactantius, a Christian writer of the fourth century. They were the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Cimmerian, the Erythraean, the Samian, the Cumaean, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian and the Tiburtine. Each was associated with a place and sometimes with a proper name, such as Albunea for the Sibyl of Tibur.

Among these, the Sibyl of Erythrae, in Ionia, enjoyed special prestige. Pausanias calls her Herophile and relates that at Delphi visitors were shown the rock on which she was said to have sung her oracles. According to one tradition, she foretold the Trojan War. It was from Erythrae, after the fire on the Capitol in 83 BC, that the Romans gathered Sibylline verses to rebuild their prophetic books.

The Christian Sibyls

Between the second century BC and late antiquity, Jewish and then Christian authors composed in Greek hexameters a collection of texts attributed to the Sibyl, the Sibylline Oracles, full of prophecies about world history and the final judgement. Augustine, in the City of God, quotes an acrostic attributed to the Erythraean Sibyl, in which the initial letters of the lines form the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.

Thanks to these texts the Sibyl was welcomed as a pagan prophetess of Christ. The medieval sequence Dies irae names her beside King David as a witness to the day of judgement. In the Renaissance Michelangelo painted five Sibyls on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, the Delphic, the Erythraean, the Cumaean, the Persian and the Libyan, alternating with the prophets of the Old Testament.

The history of the Sibyls shows the extraordinary vitality of a figure born on the margins of Greek religion. From the solitary voice described by Heraclitus, the Sibyl became guardian of Rome's destinies and then herald of the Christian faith, always keeping the allure of a prophecy that comes from afar.