324

interpret

Riddle,

not

success

ful.

ART. II.-The Sibylline Riddle. By W. H. SCOTT, M.A.

THE Sibylline Riddle is one of the curiosities of litera

ture. It is found in the Greek poems, or rather

metrical collection, called the "Sibylline Oracles"; and it came into notice at the time of the first publication of Attempts that collection after the revival of letters. Many attempts made to to interpret it, but none of them satisfactory, were made Sibylline by the learned of the day, of which the record may be seen in the works of Morhof, Isaac Vossius, John Albert Fabricius, and other writers. It became, under the title of "The Gordian Knot", even the subject of a book; but from that day to the present (for in 1856 the learned French editor of the Sibyllines, M. Alexandre,' admits hitherto that he has nothing to add on this subject to previous conjectures) it has remained a mystery,-a solitary and singular specimen of a puzzle devised by man's ingenuity, which has resisted solution for perhaps seventeen centu ries. With antecedents so unpromising, it may seem rash for any one now to attack the same problem in the confi dence of success; yet I hope, nevertheless, to make it evi interpre- dent, in the course of a few pages, that its true interpretation may be determined with perfect certainty, and that offered. the real wonder is rather, how an interpretation so obvious, when once given, could so long have escaped the obser vation of keen inquirers. The subject being one little fa miliar to most readers, it is necessary to introduce it with some general account of the collection in which the riddle

A true

tation

now

occurs.

Brief acWhen Hermas, in his vision, saw, as he relates it,' a count of woman of venerable age come and present him with a Sibylline Oracles, volume containing sacred knowledge, and on being ques tioned by the angel at his side who she was, said he thought she was a Sibyl, but was answered that "he was mistaken, for she was no Sibyl, but the Church of God", he could little have imagined that there was actually in course of formation about that very time (the date of his vision being supposed to be not very long subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem) a volume of a religious kind, which

1 XPHEMOI EIBYAAIAKOI, curante G. Alexandre, 2 vols., Paris,

1851-1856.

"Hermæ Pastor, Sib. I., Vis. I., c. 2; Vis. II., c. 4.

would realize on a large scale the mistake which he had himself made. The words of his monitor are, in fact, the epitome of the history of the "Sibylline Oracles", those memorable compositions having always, so far as appears, been regarded by the Christians of the first centuries as the genuine utterance of the heathen pythoness; whereas in reality, as is now agreed, they are a tissue of prophecies put together by a member of the Church from her own Scriptures; coloured, indeed, here and there with a line or two of the traditional oracles of Delphi or other places, for the sake of appearance, but in form, character, and which substance, utterly unlike anything really Sibylline that is are not Sibylline, known to us through the classics, and, on the other hand, minutely corresponding to the divine oracles of Christianity.

That a "pythonical spirit" could and did, on particular occasions, proclaim the "servants of the Most High God”, and the "way of salvation", is very certain; we may even believe it to have occupied a real, though a subordinate part, in the economy of revelation; but we may positively say that it was not the source of the inspiration of these documents. The course of opinion respecting them may be traced rapidly. Quoted as being the Sibyl's, if not cer- as was tainly by Clemens Romanus, yet certainly by Josephus, thought, that is, as early as the reign of Vespasian, or of Domitian at the latest; then referred to by Justin Martyr, about the middle of the second century, as a luminous witness to the truth of the miraculous facts of our Lord's life; forbidden by the emperors of Rome to be read under pain of death, according to the same writer; quoted again by Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Clemens Alexandrinus, and others, by Tertullian towards the beginning of the third century,-by Lactantius with great copiousness, and by the Emperor Constantine with great respect, at the opening of the fourth,-at length, from the time of Constantine onwards, they begin to fall into disrepute; and the suspicions as to their genuineness, somewhat hesitatingly expressed by St. Augustine, form the introduc- but tion to the almost unqualified judgment of modern times Christhat they are mere forgeries.

tian.

Nor, all things considered, is this a conclusion to be re- Their gretted. We have gained by it more than we have lost. value Heathen oracles, so minute in their inspiration, if in- creased.

3 Acts, xvi. 17.

thus in

They

books,

spired, as to announce even the name of the Blessed Virgin, and the number of baskets containing the fragments of the loaves and fishes miraculously multiplied, never could have done more in the long run than impair the prerogatives of those of Isaias or Daniel in the Sacred Canon; whereas, admitting them to be fictitious, we have the advantage of regarding them as monuments of the mode of thinking or speculating, on sacred or other subjects, in the age when they were composed; as, for instance, when they are employed in the form of anteNicene testimony to our Lord's divinity. They are literary weeds, to which time gives an accidental value, as is often the case; and, as a wilderness of vegetation may be converted by the operation of centuries into a rich coal mine, so may these yield a treasure to the future of which they gave no promise on their first ap

pearance.

As to their contents and arrangement, they consist in consist of the ordinary editions of eight "books", or sets of compo eight sitions, of various length, some of them apparently com plete, some fragmentary, and some a patchwork of heterogeneous pieces, strung together by the Greek editor (so to call him), who lived probably about the time of Jus tinian,' and who, as he tells us in his preface, reduced the "oracles" to order and harmony, and the consecutive form in which we now have them. But to these eight have to be added in the present day four others, an eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth book, published from the Vatican manuscripts for the first time by Cardinal Maii in 1828, and lately edited, in conjunction with the original series, with a very elaborate and learned found by apparatus of notes and essays, by M. Alexandre, who decides, after careful examination (and we may accept his conclusion), that the first eight are identical in the main with the Sibylline Oracles so frequently quoted by the Fathers down to the time of Lactantius.

with

four

others

Maii;

not all

at one

time,

As to the date of the collection, it is not to be ima written gined that they were written by any means simultaneously. Josephus, writing under Domitian, certainly never could have quoted a work written under the Antonines. But we are sure that the fifth Sibylline was then written; for it contains what professes to be a prophecy of the emperors of Rome in regular succession, from

'Orac. Sibyll. i., 358, viii. 458. B Alexandre, Excurs. v., c. XV.

Julius Cæsar down to M. Aurelius, indicating each emperor by the numeral power of the initial letter of his name, together, usually, with some historical fact in the life of each; and as nothing historical is related beyond Aurelius, it is tolerably evident that nothing more was known to the composer. A similar inference must be drawn as to the eighth book, where it is said in the same manner that a series of fifteen kings shall terminate in one bearing the name of the Adriatic, that is, Hadrian, and that after Hadrian there shall be three (spoken of in the fifth book as "three branches"), who "shall live in the very last days” (πανύστατον ἦμαρ ἔχοντες), these being the Antonines, Pius and Aurelius, and Lucius Verus. Again, the date of the composition of the fourth book is much earlier, being determined by the description at the end of it of the eruption of Vesuvius, to the period of the reign of Titus, when that eruption occurred, or of Domitian, his successor. On the other hand, the new "Oracles" discovered by Maii descend to Valerian and Gallienus, beyond the middle of the third century; and though not without value, whether as illustrating the mode of the formation of the original eight, or as repeating, with variations, and so explaining, particular passages in the former which present difficulties, are of secondary interest, and very inferior in composition. The or in one books of the "Oracles" vary also in the indications which place. they contain of the place where they were composed, some being assignable to Asia Minor, and some to Alexandria.

book.

book,

More than this need hardly be said, and less could not, Riddle is by way of introduction to the notice of the first book of in first the series, which is the one containing the riddle. It Contents has more of the character of a poem than the other books, of the and is largely made up of words and fragments of verses derived from Hesiod. It begins with an imitation of the Scriptural account of the creation and fall of man, after which come the generations succeeding one another from Adam, which are given as five, down to the flood of Noe. Of the flood itself there is a minute and vigorous description, in the course of which comes the riddle. Then follows the mention of the posterity of Noe (who are considered to make the sixth generation, and are identified with the Titans), down to the building (so we gather

* E. y. Nerva is described as Πεντηκοντάριθμος γεραρὸς βροτός, ν. 41.