Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 3. The Sibylline oracles

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

As we saw in Part 2, some fragments of the Sibylline books were in public circulation in pagan Rome. Cicero and Dionysios of Halikarnassos accurately describe some aspects of the surviving fragments. There were also imitators.

Vergil at work: illustration before Eclogue 4 in cod. Vat. lat. 3867, fol. 9r (image source: Vatican Library)

Vergil’s fourth Eclogue is a relatively loose example. It’s framed as a ‘prophecy’ linked to the Cumaean Sibyl, though it doesn’t try to replicate the style or imagery of the Sibylline books. Vergil doesn’t give instructions for rituals, and there are no acrostics: as Parke puts it, it’s ‘a transposition of Sibylline motifs into a pastoral key’. Vergil foretells a glorious future golden age surrounding a child who is to be born in the consulship of Asinius Pollio (40 BCE). It’s hard to avoid thinking that aspect may have been partly inspired by the childbirth mentioned in the surviving Sibylline books quotation.

Parke 1988: 145. Pollio’s consulship: Eclogue 4.3, 4.11–12. Birth of a male child: 4.8 onwards. Acrostics: a few Vergil scholars have noted that the first letters of Eclogue 4.47–52 spell out cacata ‘shitty’, but nearly all scholars regard it as an accident. If Vergil had really wanted to do an acrostic, he was perfectly capable of doing something comparable to the Sibylline books, rather than putting an isolated word of doubtful implication at a random point in mid-poem.

The Sibylline oracles are closer imitations. These are a group of eleven poems and eight fragments, mostly Jewish, with an assortment of Christian additions, in Greek hexameter verse. They range in date from the 2nd century BCE to the 7th century CE. Several of the poems list off dynasties of kings and emperors, framing them as though they’re predictions. In some poems the timeline reaches all the way from the Creation (as in Genesis) up to the end times and the Last Judgement (as in Enoch or Revelation).

A sample

Here’s an excerpt: Sibylline oracles 4, lines 125–139, about various disasters ‘predicted’ to occur in the 1st century CE (trans. John Collins).

(125) A leader of Rome will come to Syria who will burn
the Temple of Jerusalem with fire, at the same time slaughter
many men and destroy the great land of the Jews with its broad roads.
Then indeed an earthquake will destroy at once Salamis and Paphos
when the dark water overwhelms Cyprus, which is washed by many waves.

(130) But when a firebrand, turned away from a cleft in the earth
in the land of Italy, reaches to broad heaven,
it will burn many cities and destroy men.
Much smoking ashes will fill the great sky,
and showers will fall from heaven like red earth.
(135) Know then the wrath of the heavenly God,
because they will destroy the blameless tribe of the pious.
Then the strife of war being aroused will come to the west,
and the fugitive from Rome will also come, brandishing a great spear,
having crossed the Euphrates with many myriads.

This covers Titus’ assault and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; an earthquake on Cyprus; the eruption of Vesuvius in 79; and the coming of one of the various false Neros, coming westward with Parthian support (probably the one mentioned in Dion Cassius 66.19.3, who came west as far as the Euphrates at some point in 79–81).

After this point S.O. 4 stops predicting ‘history’ and moves on to the end times. The references above are detailed enough that the poem should be understood to have been written not long after 81 CE.

Opening of Sibylline oracles 1 in the edition of Geffcken (1902: 6)

How many poems?

Yes yes, I know, lots of online sources say ‘fourteen’. They’re wrong. Modern editions assign the poems numbers up to 14. But the actual number of poems is eleven — or thirteen, or fifteen, depending on how you count: fourteen is the only count that’s definitely wrong.

The confusion is because the Oracles were transmitted in two overlapping collections.

The first collection, S.O. 1 to 8, has never been lost, and has been in print since the 1500s. Poems 1 and 2 are actually a single poem, but the first modern editor, Sixt Birck (a.k.a. Betuleius), decided to count them separately for no good reason, and unfortunately the numbering is now pretty much set in stone. There are indications that there was once a further poem in between S.O. 2 and 3 — the opening section of S.O. 3 is clearly from a separate poem —; also, as we’ll see below, that Lactantius had a copy of this collection, and that his copy had nine poems. So this collection can be counted as seven, eight, or nine poems.

The second collection was discovered in the 1800s. The first editor carried on the numbering from eight, and there are seven poems, so they’re numbers 9 to 15. But three of them — S.O. 9, 10, and 15 — duplicate material from the first collection. So modern editions only ever print the new ones, poems 11 to 14. (Poem 12 is a continuation of poem 11, but they were composed at different times and should be counted separately.)

So the full modern collection is S.O. 1/2; a missing poem of which fragments survive; S.O. 3 to 8; and 11 to 14. Eleven poems — or fifteen if you use Betuleius’ count, and count the duplications in S.O. 9, 10, and 15. Between them, they come to over 4,000 lines of hexameter.

You’re right to be confused. Recent commentaries on Sibylline oracles 1/2 and 3 assume you’re already familiar with at least parts of this. It’s explained in the introduction to the standard critical edition, by Johannes Geffcken, but if you can’t read Geffcken’s German, things are going to be bewildering. A much friendlier guide is one given by John Collins in The Old Testament pseudepigrapha, volume 1. Collins gives an excellent introduction to each poem; a full English translation; and detailed notes. At the time of writing, Collins’ translation is the only good English translation of the Oracles.

Critical edition: Geffcken 1902. English edition: Collins 1983. Commentary on S.O. 1/2: Lightfoot 2007. Commentary on S.O. 3: Buitenwerf 2003. On the opening section of S.O. 3 being a fragment from a separate poem, see Buitenwerf 2003: 79–94; Collins 1983: 359–360. (Note that Buitenwerf and Collins have opposing views on whether S.O. frs. 1–3 should be assigned to S.O. 3 or to another lost poem).

The contents of the Oracles

Here’s an overview. The dates are those assigned by Collins (but note that some of the dates aren’t universally agreed).

First collection (φ and ψ manuscript groups; first ed. Betuleius, 1545):

Poem	Date	Origin and contents
1/2	before 150 CE	Phrygian Jewish original. Timeline from Creation to Last Judgement; some phases removed and replaced by a Christian section on Christ and the fall of Jerusalem (1.323–400).
3.1–92	in phases, II BCE–I CE?	Fragment. Jewish (with Christian elements?). Hymn to God; rule of Rome; destruction of Temple; return of Nero, called ‘Beliar’. (93–96 = a further fragment.)
3.97–829	II BCE	Egyptian Jewish. Miscellany: Tower of Babel, Titanomachy, Exodus, Exile, oracles against foreign nations, ethics, eschatology.
4	late I CE	Jewish. Timeline of empires from Assyrian empire to fall of Jerusalem (600s BCE to 70 CE); end times.
5	late I CE	Egyptian Jewish. Timeline, 30 BCE–70 CE: fall of Ptolemies to fall of Jerusalem.
6	unclear	Christian. Short hymn (28 lines).
7	II–III CE	Christian. Historical snippets; the Flood; coming of Christ; end times.
8	II–III CE	Jewish (1–216) and Christian (217–428) sections. Religious perspective on world history. Christian acrostic at 217–250.

Second collection (Ω manuscript group; first ed. Mai, 1825):

Poem	Date	Origin and contents
9		Duplicate: = S.O. 6.1–28 + 7.1 + 8.218–428.
10		Duplicate: = S.O. 4.
11	early I CE?	Jewish. Timeline from the Flood up to the death of Cleopatra (to 30 BCE).
12	ca. 235 CE	Jewish; later continuation of S.O. 11. Some duplication: S.O. 12.1–11 = S.O. 5.1–11. Timeline, 30 BCE–235 CE, Augustus to Alexander Severus.
13	ca. 265 CE	Jewish (with one Christian line added). Historical: ca. 240–265 CE, new Palmyrene kingdom under Odaenathus, and Parthians under Mareades.
14	VII CE	Alexandrian Jewish. Jumble of references: later Roman emperors, Egypt, Rashidun conquest of Syria/Egypt.
15		Duplicate: = S.O. 8.1–9.

Why ‘Sibylline’?

These poems weren’t designed for a pre-existing collection of Sibylline material: they were composed separately from one another, over a period of centuries. So why do we refer to them as ‘sibylline’? Three reasons.

First: at the end of S.O. 3, the narrator explicitly claims to be one (or two) of the Sibyls. Lines 809–818 (trans. Collins, my emphasis):

(I say) these things to you, having left
(810) the long Babylonian walls of Assyria, frenzied, a fire sent to Greece,
prophesying the disclosures of God to all mortals,
so that I prophesy divine riddles to men.
Throughout Greece mortals will say that I am of another country,
a shameless one, born of Erythrae. Some will say that
(815) I am Sibylla born of Circe as mother and Gnostos as father,
a crazy liar. But when everything comes to pass,
then you will remember me and no longer will anyone
say that I am crazy, I who am a prophetess of the great God.

This doubles up as a claim to be both the Chaldaian Sibyl (from Babylon) and the Erythraian Sibyl. When ancient Christian writers quote from this poem, they ascribe it to the Erythraian Sibyl.

Second: there’s an acrostic in S.O. 8.217–250, mostly duplicated in S.O. 9. The first letters of each line spell out

Ἰησοῦς Χρειστὸς θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτὴρ σταυρός

Jesus Chreist, Son of God, Saviour, Cross

Incidentally there’s nothing surprising about the spelling ‘Chreist’: Koine Greek in the 2nd century CE uses ει, η, or ι to represent the sound [i], swapping between them freely.

Unlike the acrostics in Phlegon’s quotation (see Part 2), this acrostic isn’t a hexameter. Still, acrostics are a feature that was known to be associated with the Sibylline books. S.O. 9 reproduces most of the acrostic: that poem duplicates parts of S.O. 6, 7, and 8. But weirdly, it omits the first line of the acrostic, the one that provides the ι of ‘Jesus’. The preceding line (= S.O. 7.1) starts with an ω, so the acrostic is definitely incomplete. This shows, first, that S.O. 9 is a secondary version; and second, it suggests the compiler of S.O. 9 was unaware that there was an acrostic there.

S.O. 9 duplicates material from S.O. 6, 7, and 8. In this damaged manuscript, cod. Vat. gr. 1120, fol. 348v, we see the transition between them: the end of S.O. 6; one line from S.O. 7; then S.O. 8 starting at the second line of the acrostic. This MS is the oldest extant copy of the second collection (14th century; Q in Geffcken’s sigla). (Base image: Vatican Library; my annotations)

Third: ancient testimony casts the poems as ‘sibylline’. Alexander Polyhistor (mid-1st century BCE) shows an acquaintance with the earliest poem, S.O. 3, when he refers to the Tower of Babel in connection with the Babylonian Flood myth and the Sibyl (FGrHist 273 F 79).

From around 100 CE onwards, Christian writers refer to the Sibyls as authors of prophetic visions, though not yet explicitly citing the poems that we know (Shepherd of Hermas 8). The earliest citations are to S.O. 3 — which is to be expected, since that’s the only poem that makes an explicit claim to be sibylline.

Possibly the earliest citation is in Justin Martyr. Around 155 CE he refers to a prophecy that the world will be dissolved in fire. This may be from multiple sources: Justin is probably mainly thinking of Stoic ekpyrosis, but he explicitly refers to Sibylla (or a Sibyl), as well as the legendary Zoroastrian figure Hystaspes.

A couple of decades later we start to get more clearcut citations, starting with Athenagoras (170s) and Tertullian (190s). They quote verbatim from S.O. 3, and explicitly cite ‘the Sibyl’.

Justin, First apology 20, possibly alluding to S.O. 3.53–54. Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 30; Tertullian, To the nations 2.12, both quoting S.O. 3.108–113 (in Latin in Tertullian’s case). For fuller documentation of ancient Christian citations of the Sibyls and the Sibylline oracles, see Parke 1988: 152–173.

But Lactantius is the most influential case. His works contain around 40 quotations from Sibylline oracles 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. And one passage has an especially condensed cluster of sibylline references. In Divine institutes 1.6, Lactantius

• (1.6.7–12) reports Varro’s canon of ten Sibyls (see Part 1);
• (1.6.10–11) tells the fable of how the Sibylline books were sold to king Tarquin (see Part 2);
• (1.6.13) claims that each of the poems was written by one of Varro’s Sibyls, except that there is no poem by the Cumaean Sibyl because the Romans keep her books secret;
• (1.6.13) paraphrases S.O. 3.808–813;
• (1.6.15) quotes the Greek text of S.O. fr. 1.7, fr. 3.3–5, and fr. 1.15–16, apparently implying that they are also from the Erythraian Sibyl (i.e. they were originally part of S.O. 3);
• (1.6.16) quotes S.O. 8.377, stating that it’s from a separate poem.

From this, we know Lactantius’ copy contained nine poems: he attributes the poems he knows to the Sibyls in Varro’s canon of ten, except for the Cumaean Sibyl. We also know it contained S.O. 3 through 8, so if it wasn’t an exemplar of the first collection described above, it was closely related to it. So it seems likely that Lactantius’ copy consisted of S.O. 1 to 8 (that is, seven poems) plus two further lost poems; that it had a fuller text of S.O. 3; and that one of the extra poems in his copy was the source of the fragment in S.O. 3.1–92.

See note above on the relation of fragments 1–3 to S.O. 3. Collins thinks fragments 1–3 come from a poem that once existed between S.O. 2 and 3, Buitenwerf things they come from S.O. 3: it depends on how you read the phrasing when Lactantius quotes from them. Collins thinks Lactantius may also have known S.O. 2, and that Div. inst. 7.15.10 paraphrases S.O. 2.21–22.

So Lactantius is the most powerful and direct reason that the collections came to be known as ‘sibylline’.

He’s also the first victim of a clump of misperceptions that have affected many people since then — the idea that the Sibylline oracles poems are genuinely related to Varro’s Sibyls; the idea that they’re derived from or related to the Roman Sibylline books. That confusion sets the tone for a lot of what we’ll see in Part 4, on developments in the Renaissance.

In recent scholarship, though — or most of it — it’s understood that the links between these things are only apparent links. The Sibylline oracles are first and foremost Jewish-Christian apocalyptic literature. They draw some motifs from pagan sibylline traditions, but their roots lie much more in 3rd–2nd century BCE Jewish apocalyptic literature, like Daniel and Enoch, than in the Roman Sibylline books.

References

• Buitenwerf, R. 2003. Book III of the Sibylline oracles and its social setting. Leiden.
• Collins, J. J. 1983. ‘Sibylline oracles.’ In: Charlesworth, J. H. (ed.) The Old Testament pseudepigrapha, vol. 1. New York. 317–472. [Internet Archive]
• Geffcken, J. 1902. Die Oracula Sibyllina. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller. Leipzig. [Internet Archive]
• Lightfoot, J. L. 2007. The Sibylline oracles. With introduction, translation, and commentary on the first and second books. Oxford.
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.

Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 2. The Sibylline books

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

Once upon a time, in early Rome, a mysterious old woman came to king Tarquin to sell him a collection of books.

By the 1st century BCE the woman in the story was identified as the Cumaean Sibyl. We don’t know if that was always the case. But, based on that identification, the books were called the Sibyllini libri (Sibylline books) or Sibyllina oracula (Sibylline oracles). For clarity I’ll consistently call them the ‘Sibylline books’, as I explained in Part 1.

19th century illustration of the Capitoline and temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the Republican period. (Source: Friedrich Polack, Geschichtsbilder aus der allgemeinen und vaterländischen Geschichte, 1903 edition, fig. 61)

The story is a fable, but the books were real. Dionysios says they were held in a stone chest in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and curated by a body of priests — the decemviri sacris faciundis, ‘ten men appointed for sacred rites’.

There was a fire in 83 BCE, and the books were destroyed. A new temple was built. The Romans had new books made, and Sulla expanded the priests to fifteen — the quindecimviri. In 28 BCE the replacement books were rehoused in the newly built temple of Palatine Apollo. They continued to be used for several more centuries.

The Sibylline books weren’t primarily books of predictions: they were instructions for rituals, which also mentioned predictions in passing. The idea seems to have been that, when required, priests might choose a ritual from the books, then perform that ritual, to ensure purity, or ward off evil. Some extracts were made public, but a complete text wasn’t widely known.

The sale of the books

The most famous thing about the books is the story of how they were sold. Every version of the fable goes back to Varro’s book Antiquitates rerum divinarum, ‘Ancient matters concerning the gods’, written between 63 and 49 BCE (see Part 1).

Varro’s book is lost, but the story appears in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who came to Rome around 30 BCE, and Dionysios attributes the story to Varro. Somewhat different versions appear in Aulus Gellius, Lactantius, and shorter allusions elsewhere.

Dionysios of Halikarnassos 4.62 (citing Varro); Aulus Gellius 1.19; Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6. Further references: Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum frs. 56–60 ed. Cardauns; Cicero, On divination 2.(54).110–112; Pliny, Natural history 13.(27).88; Phlegon of Tralles, FGrHist 257 F 36.10; Servius, commentary on Aeneid 6.72.

Here’s the gist, skipping over some variations.

An old woman comes to visit king Tarquin, carrying nine books of oracular instructions. But she asks for an incredible price, 300 gold philippics, so Tarquin just laughs. She promptly burns three of the books, and offers the remaining six at the same price. Tarquin laughs even harder, so she burns another three, and offers the last three again, still at the same exorbitant price. This time Tarquin realises it’s no joke, and he agrees to the sale. The old woman departs and is never seen again.

How much of this is real? Well, Tarquin was a real 6th century BCE king — though the sources vary on whether it’s Tarquinius Priscus or Tarquinius Superbus — but no real records from that period ever existed. The books were real, but they weren’t anything like as old as that. And the Sibyl is purely mythical.

Just in case you’re tempted to think there’s something to the story, bear in mind: the price the old woman asks for is in 4th century BCE Macedonian coinage. 6th century Rome didn’t have coinage.

After the original Sibylline books were burned in 83 BCE, the Romans had replacements made. Allegedly these were pieced together from many places, including cities in Italy, but especially from Erythrai in Anatolia.

The beginning of the sole surviving fragment of the Sibylline books, in cod. Heidelberg. Palat. gr. 398, fol. 226r (image source: Universität Heidelberg library)

The surviving quotations

Later sources tell us that the Sibylline books were written in Greek hexameter verse, and they had acrostics: the first letters of each line also spell out hexameter verses. That’s what Cicero and Dionysios describe, and it’s also what we see in the surviving extracts.

An excerpt of Phlegon of Tralles’ On marvels (2nd century CE) quotes seventy lines from the Sibylline books. Phlegon doesn’t explain how the quotation came to be public knowledge. He treats it as a single quotation, but it’s clear that it’s actually two separate quotations, of 29 and 41 lines. The Greek text is most easily found in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker.

FGrHist 257 F 36.10 = Hansen 1996: 40–43 (translation), 126–137 (commentary) = cod. Heidelberg. Palatinus. gr. 398 fols. 226r–227r.

The first quotation (lines 1–29) gives instructions for rites to honour Demeter and Persephone. A public coin collection is to be made to fund a ritual sacrifice performed by women, with roles grouped by age (girls, married women, and old women). No alcohol is to be involved in the ritual. The duty of the married women is to carry torches, suggesting that the ritual is supposed to take place at night. The girls sacrifice bulls to Demeter and cows to Persephone, and the old women place the offerings in a fire.

The second quotation (30–70) describes further rituals, this time an expiatory rite to avert evil: an ox to be sacrificed to Demeter, Persephone, and Hades; a goat to Apollo; and a cow to Hera. Again, the text specifies that the ritual must not involve alcohol. The second half of this quotation is an ex eventu ‘prediction’ of the Greek colonisation of Cumae, and the arrival of Trojans in Italy — suggesting that the speaker should be understood as either the Cumaean or Cimmerian Sibyl.

The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as depicted in the TV series Rome (2005–2007)

The acrostics

The text has acrostics embedded in the first letter of each line, just as Cicero and Dionysios describe. Each acrostic spells out more hexameter verse. Some letters are missing in the acrostics, implying that the quotations have some lines missing. The first acrostic, in lines 1–29, goes:

<μ>οῖραν ὀπισθομα<θῶν, τίν’ ἔ>φυ πᾶς εἰς τόπον ἐλθ<εῖν>

Everyone learns too late their fate, the place they’re destined to go

This line doesn’t appear in the text Phlegon quotes: he starts with the line corresponding to the ο of <μ>οῖραν. Traditionally scholars have thought the acrostic should be understood as line 1, so that μοῖραν provides its own first letter (Hansen 1996: 129–130). It’s grammatically possible for the acrostic to act as line 1, but I have doubts: it isn’t how Cicero describes the acrostics (On divination 2.(54).112), and it isn’t what we see in the second quotation.

There, the first letters of each line are provided by lines that Phlegon quotes (though there are letters missing elsewhere):

ἵππωι ἀγαλλόμενος, πάλιν αὖ <κα>κὸν εἰς νέον ἥξει
αὐτά<ρ>. . .

Exulting in his horse, he will come back to a new evil,
then . . .

Lines 59 and 60 have to be swapped around to make the νε of νέον.

For now, at least, I’ll entertain the possibility that there’s a line missing for the μ of <μ>οῖραν. So the quoted text and the missing lines are as follows, using Jacoby’s line numbers (and my additions in parentheses). Quotation 1:

• line 1a: the first acrostic
• (line 1b: a missing line corresponding to μ in the first acrostic?)
• 1–13, as quoted by Phlegon
• 13a–g: seven lines missing, corresponding to the missing -θωντινε- in the first acrostic
• 14–29, as quoted
• 29a–c: three lines missing, corresponding to -ειν in the first acrostic

And quotation 2:

• (lines 29d–e: the second acrostic; Jacoby prints it only in the critical apparatus)
• lines 30–52, as quoted
• 52a–b: two lines missing, corresponding to κα- in the second acrostic
• 53–70, as quoted
• an unknown number of lines missing, starting with the ρ of αὐτά<ρ>

Which Sibylline books?

Phlegon says the quotation comes from an occasion in 125 BCE when the senate commanded the hieromnēmones — ‘rite officials’, presumably the decemviri — to consult the Sibylline books on the occasion of the birth of an intersex baby (androgynos). If that’s right, the quotation is from the pre-83 BCE books.

Modern scholars have taken Phlegon at his word. But their focus has been on showing that the quotation is close to 125 BCE because it’s much later than the Roman regal period. It used to need argument to show that it’s Hellenistic. That isn’t a matter for debate these days.

Diels 1890: 77–103; Parke 1988: 137–138; Hansen 1996: 126–127; McInerney 2016.

But I don’t know that there’s been any consideration of the possibility that the quotations are from the replacement books that were compiled after 83 BCE. On balance I don’t think a post-83 date is compelling. But there are good reasons to take it seriously:

• When we’re told that the books were in hexameter, that they contained acrostics, and that they were in Greek, all of that information comes from post-Varro sources.
• No source other than Phlegon claims to describe the pre-83 BCE books.
• Dionysios — who cites Varro — explicitly states that the acrostics are a feature of the replacement books, and that acrostics are a sign that a passage isn’t an ‘interpolation’.
• When Dionysios describes the compilation of the replacement books, he doesn’t claim that they replicated the originals, or that replication was even the goal.
• The quotations are very clearly not from the 6th century BCE. That’s been obvious since Diels, who dated both of them to the last decade of the 200s BCE, based on language, historical context, and metrical features. Some modern studies have considered dates as late as 83.

Just to emphasise: there are no sources telling us what the original books looked like, and there’s no real reason to assume that they looked anything like the replacement books that Varro talked about. It’s perfectly imaginable that Phlegon linked them to an incident of an intersex baby born in 125 BCE solely because lines 4–5 refer to an intersex baby.

The profile of metrical irregularities points to a date no earlier than the 200s BCE:

• 8 cases of ‘Attic’ correption (short syllable before a mute + liquid), 5× word-internal: 10 ἀθροίσας, 34 πάτραι, 44 ἴδρις, 51 πατρίοισι, 56 πατρίοισι; 3× at word-boundary: 48 Παιήονα κρᾶτα, 54 Κυμαίδα πρόφρονες, 68 ὔμμι χρόνος
• 1 violation of Meyer’s First Law (avoidance of a word starting in beats 1–2 and ending in beat 4a or 4b): 33
• 7 violations of Meyer’s Second Law (avoidance of a word with the rhythm ⏑ – in beats 4b–5): 29, 40, 52, 54, 56, 63, 65
• 5 violations of Meyer’s Third Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏕ – ⏕ – in beats 6–9): 1a, 27, 36, 41, 66
• 2 violations of Hermann’s Bridge (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm ⏑ – ⏕ – × at line-end, i.e. in beats 8b–12): 41, 51
• (no violations of Varro’s Bridge, Tiedke-Meyer’s Law, or Wernicke’s Law)

I omit irregularities involving a word boundary preceded by a monosyllable, and those involving a word boundary followed by an enclitic.

A closer look at Attic correption shows that the rate of lengthening before mute + liquid consonant clusters is relatively high at word boundaries (16.7%), but considerably lower than most other poets within a word (50.0%). I haven’t been able to track down figures for hexameter poets, but among elegiac poets the closest fit is Mnasalkes (3rd century BCE).

For figures on the incidence of word-initial and word-internal Attic correption in elegiac poets see Slings 1993.

This profile of metrical irregularities would be as unsurprising in a 1st century BCE poet as in the 3rd century. So I think a more compelling fact pointing to a slightly earlier date is the use of iota adscript. I don’t mean iota subscripts in the Phlegon manuscript — that’s 9th century CE — but in the acrostics: the second acrostic depends on iota adscript for its first word, ἵππωι.

That still isn’t conclusive, but it does create a weak presumption in favour of a pre-83 BCE date. Prior to 200 BCE, extant papyri are consistent about including the iota in ωι, ηι, and ᾱι; later, they start to be irregular. So Phlegon’s quotation looks like something dating to the 3rd or 2nd century BCE.

The evidence is compatible with a post-83 BCE date, but I don’t see an orthographic or metrical reason to prefer a post-83 BCE date. For the record I’d quite like to assign a later date! But the evidence isn’t enough to overturn Phlegon’s statement that the quotations were used in 125 BCE.

References

• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H. 1890. Sibyllinische Blätter. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Hansen, W. 1996. Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of marvels. Exeter.
• McInerney, J. 2016. ‘Phlegon of Tralles (257).’ In: Worthington, I. (ed.) New Jacoby. BNJ 257.
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Slings, S. R. 1993. ‘Hermesianax and the Tattoo Elegy (P.Brux. inv. E 8934 and P.Sorb. inv. 2254).’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 98: 29-37. [JSTOR]

Note, twenty days later: I have corrected the list of metrical irregularities after spotting two errors resulting from my own notes.

Sibyls and Sibylline oracles. 1. The Sibyls

1. Sibyls | 2. Sibylline books | 3. Sibylline oracles | 4. The Renaissance

The Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Vatican has paintings of seven ancient Hebrew prophets, but also of five Sibyls — non-Christian prophetic figures. How and why did pagan prophets come to have such a place of honour in the centre of western Christianity?

Central part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo, 1508–1512)

The full answer is surprisingly long. We have to consider genres of ancient Greek poetry; Roman myth and ritual; ancient Jewish and Christian poems about the end of the world; and also music by a 16th century Dutch composer.

The short answer

An answer that focuses just on the Sistine Chapel looks like this. A 4th century Christian writer, Lactantius, wrote about a canon of ten Sibyls: ancient seers lost in the mists of time. They were pagan, Lactantius says, but they accurately predicted the coming of Christ, so you could say they were ‘virtuous pagans’.

Lactantius’ virtuous Sibyls became influential in 15th century Italy, the so-called Quattrocento, around the time of the introduction of the printing press. They appeared in many artworks and books: they’re a major feature of the floor decorations in Siena Cathedral, for example (1480s). They were a well established motif by the time Michelangelo came to his own fresco painting in the first decade of the 1500s. This is why he included Sibyls alongside Hebrew prophets: they were all considered to be pre-Christian prophets of Christ.

And if that’s all you came here for, great! You’re done now. But there’s a lot more to it ...

The start of a longer answer

We have to distinguish four distinct meanings of ‘Sibyls’. A difficulty with Sibylline things is that when people talk about any of these four meanings, they tend to mix them up. One is just a list of names; one refers to a group of texts that is now lost; two of them refer to real texts that still exist today.

1. The Sibyls themselves: originally there was one mythical woman named Sibylla, but more Sibyls appeared as time went on. In the 1st century BCE Varro drew up a canon of ten Sibyls: the Erythraian Sibyl, the Persian Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, and so on.
2. The Sibylline books. These were real sacred texts in pagan Rome, but are now lost except for two long quotations. They were used for rituals by an important body of priests, the decemviri, or later the quindecimviri.
3. The Sibylline oracles. These texts still exist today, but they’re not pagan. They’re two collections of Jewish and Christian poems, ranging from the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE, on a range of religious themes, in ancient Greek hexameter verse.
4. The prophetiae Sibyllarum (‘prophecies of the Sibyls’). This is a set of twelve neo-Latin epigrams written in the Sibyls’ wave of popularity in the Quattrocento, possibly for a theatrical production. They’d be forgotten today if not for a stunning musical setting by Roland de Lassus, for an unaccompanied four-part choir (ca. 1558).

There’s some overlap, so for clarity I’ll consistently use the labels in bold.

Lactantius mixed up the first three meanings. He had a copy of nine of the Sibylline oracles (the Jewish and Christian poems); he thought they must be the same thing as the Sibylline books (the Roman ritual texts); and he attributed each poem to one of the Sibyls in Varro’s canon. This is how he came to the conclusion that the ‘real’ Sibyls genuinely foretold the coming of Christ.

Modern scholars sometimes make similar mistakes. But in terms of origins, these four meanings are quite distinct.

The Erythraian Sibyl as she appears on the pavimento of Siena Cathedral (ca. 1480)

1. The ten Sibyls (or one, or three, or eleven)

Once upon a time, in sixth century BCE Greece, there was a genre of oracular poems that dealt with things like directions on performing rituals, enigmatic animal imagery, and foretelling the future. These are the so-called ‘oracle collectors’, or chresmologoi (χρησμολόγοι).

The poems were real, but the oracle collectors were fictional personas. Real poets would adopt a persona, ‘becoming’ Abaris or Orpheus or Epimenides, and incorporate the character and their fictional biography into real poems. Think of them as stage acts, a bit like Ziggy Stardust or Slim Shady. Except a persona wasn’t the personal property of a specific real poet: different poets in different periods could ‘be’ Orpheus or Linos. We hear of one poet, Onomakritos, getting into trouble for adopting the persona of Mousaios. The personas were both men and women — men like Bakis, Epimenides, and Euklos; women like Phemonoe, Boio, and Sibylla.

Herodotos 7.6. Herodotos doesn’t understand that Onomakritos is taking on the role of Mousaios: he represents him as adding an interpolation into the text of Mousaios.

That is, ‘Sibylla’ started out as a specific person. A fictional person, but still, a single individual. References to Sibylla — as a name, not ‘the’ Sibyl — appear in Herakleitos (500s BCE), Aristophanes (400s), and Plato (300s).

But a few decades after Plato, Philitas of Kos wrote that there were three Sibyls: one from Delphi (central Greece), one from Erythrai (East Ionia, in Anatolia), and one from Sardeis (Lydia).

There were three Sibyls. One of them was Apollo’s sister, as she says in her own poem. The second was the Erythraian. The third was from Sardeis. In the same way there were three Bakises: one from Eleon in Boiotia, one Athenian, and one Arkadian.

From this point on, Sibylla was no longer a specific person. Instead, Sibyls were a class of prophetic women.

Herakleitos, 22 B 92 Diels-Kranz (= Plutarch, Moralia 397a); Aristophanes, Knights 61, Peace 1095, 1115–1116; Plato, Phaidros 244b; (pseudo-?)Plato, Theages 124d; Philitas of Kos reported in schol. Aristophanes, Birds 962 (cited as ‘Philetas of Ephesos’).

The next we hear of Sibyls is in the 1st century BCE. At some point between 64 and 49 BCE, the great Roman scholar Varro wrote a book called Ancient matters concerning the gods (Antiquitates rerum divinarum). The text is lost, but a few hundred fragments survive.

Edition: Cardauns 1976. For the date: Varro dedicated the book to Julius Caesar as pontifex maximus: so it is later than Caesar’s appointment to that role in 64 BCE, and most likely before his appointment as dictator and the outbreak of civil war in 49 BCE.

Fragments 56a–60 deal with a canon of ten Sibyls, distinguished by where they were based. Varro’s interest wasn’t purely antiquarian: he was writing not long after the loss of the so-called ‘Sibylline books’ in a fire in 83 BCE — we’ll come back to them in Part 2 — and the Romans farmed out the job of replacing the burnt books to a number of oracular institutions all over the place.

In that context, it makes sense that a canon of Sibyls would be quite important to real religious practice. It also explains why Varro’s canon is organised by where each Sibyl was based. Varro cited his sources too — though the sources are all lost, just like Varro’s own book, and our source doesn’t repeat all of Varro’s citations.

The fact that he cited a different source for each Sibyl indicates that they each had a distinct backstory — they started out as independent characters. They weren’t all named ‘Sibylla’: Varro reports personal names for several of them, and we hear of other names elsewhere. So Varro says the Cumaean Sibyl was named either Amaltheia, Herophile, or Demophile; another list of the ten calls her Taraxandra, Vergil calls her Deiphobe, pseudo-Aristotle calls her Melankraira. Take your pick.

Several later sources report Varro’s canon of ten Sibyls. The following is a synopsis.

1. Persian Sibyl (or Chaldaian, or in two lists, Hebrew); recorded by Nikanor (= FGrHist 146 F 1b). Most reports (not Lactantius) give her name as Sambethe.
2. Libyan Sibyl; mentioned in the prologue of Euripides’ play Lamia (= play description w/o no. ed. Kannicht). In this usage, ‘Libya’ refers to the whole of the Maghreb from Morocco to modern Libya.
3. Delphic Sibyl; recorded by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos in his book On Divination (= Stoicorum veterum fragmenta ii.1216).
4. Cimmerian Sibyl (in Italy); recorded in Naevius’ Punic War (= fr. 17 ed. Warmington) and Calpurnius Piso’s Annals (= FRomHist 9 F 2). ‘Cimmerian’ in this context means a priestly group attached to the nekyomanteion of Lake Avernus in Campania, near Cumae. We don’t know whether Varro imagined this to imply a connection to the Cumaean Sibyl. The Cimmerian Sibyl is stated to be the mother of Evander in two lists.
5. Erythraian Sibyl (in Asia Minor); recorded by Apollodoros of Erythrai (= FGrHist 422 F 1).
6. Samian Sibyl; named Phoito (spelled Phyto in most sources, but Phoito is the older spelling: see Tibullus 2.5.68. Note that these spellings were homophonous by the 1st century BCE); recorded by Eratosthenes (= FGrHist 241 F 26a).
7. Cumaean Sibyl (in Italy); named either Amaltheia (or Amalthia), Herophile (or Hierophile), Demophile (only in Lactantius), or Taraxandra; alternatively Deiphobe (Vergil) or Melankraira (ps.-Aristotle). This is reputedly the Sibyl that sold the Sibylline books to the king of Rome (see Part 2).
8. Hellespontian Sibyl (or Gergithian); recorded by Herakleides of Pontos (= fr. 131a ed. Wehrli). She allegedly lived at the time of Solon and Cyrus.
9. Phrygian Sibyl.
10. Tiburtine Sibyl (at Tibur, now Tivoli, in Italy); named Albunea or Abounaia.

The lists: Lactantius, Institutiones divinae 1.6.7–12 (= Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum fr. 56a ed. Cardauns); Souda σ.361; Sibylline oracles prolegomena 32–50 ed. Geffcken; schol. Plato Phaidros 244b; Theosophia 3.A.1.3 ed. Beatrice (≈ Tubingensis epitome 75–77 ed. Erbse); John Lydus, De mensibus 4.47.3 (Lydus adds an eleventh Judaean Sibyl, named Chaldis). Various Souda articles deal with individual Sibyls or alternative lists: β.354 (Delphic and Chaldaian); γ.355 (Erythraian, Sicilian, Leukanian, Sardinian, Gergithian, Rhodian, Libyan, and Samian); ε.357 (Kolophonian, apparently identified with Herophile in Pausanias 10.12.5); ζ.358 (Thessalian, named Manto, another famous chresmologic persona); η.359 (Phrygian, named Sarysis, Kassandra, or Taraxandra); and θ.360 (Cumaean and Thesprotian). Cf. also Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.21.108.1–3, referring to Phrygian/Delphic, Erythraian, Egyptian, and Italian Sibyls (the first two = Herakleides of Pontos fr. 130 ed. Wehrli); and 1.21.132.3, with a list of nine: Samian Sibyl, Kolophonian Sibyl, Cumaean Sibyl, Erythraian Sibyl, Phyto, Taraxandra, Macedonian Sibyl, Thessalian Sibyl, Thesprotian Sibyl. Pseudo-Aristotle, Mirabilia 838a,5–10, states that Sibylla (or ‘the’ Sibyl?) was a chresmologos at Cumae, and that she was also called Melankraira; pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 954a,34–38 refers to ‘Bakises’ and ‘Sibyls’ collectively.

If you read all of the note in the textbox above, you’ll see that there’s a mass of material: it isn’t very consistent, and over time there were major shifts in how people described the Sibyls.

One important thing to emphasise is that there are no stories or myths about the Sibyls collectively. A couple of them have stories about them. The Cumaean Sibyl is important in the origin story of the Sibylline books (see Part 2); some like Phoito have an independent existence to an extent.

The confusion of names probably comes from attempts to harmonise multiple disparate traditions. The separate listing of the Cimmerian and Cumaean Sibyls is always going to be a bit puzzling, given that they’re both based at Cumae.

One source, Pausanias (10.12.1–6), tries to resolve some of the multiplicity of Sibyls by identifying Herophile as the Sibyl, and saying that she moved around — from Samos to Kolophon, Delos, Delphi, and the Troad — and that Erythrai also laid claim to her. As a result, in Pausanias, Herophile accounts for at least four of Varro’s Sibyls (Samian, Delphic, Hellespontian or Phrygian, and Erythraian).

The only ones that seem to have an irresolvably separate existence are the Persian, Libyan, and Tiburtine Sibyls — and there are probably sources out there that I haven’t found who identify them with someone else. The Tiburtine Sibyl seems to be the safest: her name looks suspiciously Latin — Abunaea or Albunea or something of the sort — which tends to shield her from the harmonising we see in Greek-language sources.

In Part 2 we’ll turn to the Sibylline books, and what’s known about them. In the meantime, for further reading on chresmologoi and the Sibyls, Parke’s (1988) book on Sibyls is excellent (if a bit overwhelming).

References

• Beatrice, P. F. 2001. Anonymi monophysitae Theosophia. An attempt at reconstruction. Leiden.
• Cardauns, B. 1976. M. Terentius Varro. Antiquitates rerum divinarum. Teil I: die Fragmente. Wiesbaden.
• Diels, H.; Kranz, W. 1960 [1903]. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed.), 3 vols. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Geffcken, J. 1902. Die oracula Sibyllina. Leipzig. [Internet Archive]
• Parke, H. W. 1988. Sibyls and sibylline prophecy in classical antiquity. London/New York.
• Warmington, E. H. 1936. Remains of old Latin, vol. 2. Cambridge (MA). [Internet Archive]
• Wehrli, F. 1953. Die Schule von Aristoteles. Texte und Kommentar. Herakleides Pontikos. Basel.

And the word was God (John 1.1)

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was an attribute of God, and the word was God.

John 1.1 (my translation)

This isn’t a topic I’d normally write about, because it’s so basic: it seems like low-hanging fruit. But I was a little staggered today to be directed to a Youtube video where a biblical scholar, with a PhD, who ostensibly knows Greek, spends 45 minutes discussing theological reasons why the phrase θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (‘the word was God’) doesn’t have a definite article before the word ‘God’.

The opening of John in the codex Sinaiticus, fol. 247r. (Image source: Codex Sinaiticus website)

The video is sensationalised, to be sure — the title has an emoji! But the reason ‘God’ doesn’t have an article is a very simple grammar rule. When you’re learning ancient Greek, it’s covered in week 1. ‘God’ can’t have an article. Because it’s a complement.

Articles in ancient Greek

Ancient Greek had a definite article, ὁ ἡ τό (and other inflected forms), corresponding to English ‘the’. It started out as a demonstrative pronoun, and acquired its role as an article in the Archaic period, ca. 600 BCE. It has hung around to the present day. If an ancient Greek-speaker wanted to refer to a specific individual thing, or person, they normally put an article before it: ὁ ἄνθρωπος ‘the person’, ἡ ἀγορά ‘the agora’, τὸ δένδρον ‘the tree’, and of course ὁ θεός ‘the god’.

The article is common (but not used invariably) in some situations where English doesn’t use an article, particularly with names. It’s perfectly normal to refer to Sokrates as ὁ Σωκράτης. In the Bible it’s perfectly normal to refer to God as ὁ θεός. So you have to rely on context to tell whether ὁ θεός should be translated as ‘the god’ or ‘God’.

Strictly speaking it might be best to refer to the article not as ‘definite’, but as ‘definitive’, since it often plays a deictic role: Sokrates, that guy right there. Modern German has a loose parallel, in the use of the definite article before personal names: the difference between saying die Ulrike and just Ulrike is subtle, but the first one carries a reminder of which Ulrike we’re talking about.

For details of when names do and don’t have articles in Greek, see Smyth 1916: 211–213 (§768–779).

Ancient Greek didn’t have an indefinite article, corresponding to English ‘a, an, some’. (Modern Demotic Greek does, but it’s a much later arrival.) So when a noun appears in ancient Greek without an article — δένδρον instead of τὸ δένδρον — it will generally be because it’s indefinite: ‘a tree’. There are cases where the article can be optional, as with personal names.

There are also situations where an article is invariably used, and situations where an article is invariably omitted. And one of those situations is a sentence of the form ‘A is B’.

The confusion

C. J. Cornthwaite starts with the question of whether θεός is substantival (‘the word was God’) or adjectival (‘the word was divine’). That is technically a legitimate question — though there’s no reason to prefer reading a noun as adjectival when it works perfectly well as a noun. Anyway, in thinking about that, he spends a great deal of time questioning why it’s θεός instead of ὁ θεός, and what the significance of that is.

That tells me there’s a serious problem with how Greek is being taught. But just as importantly, because he’s a very popular para-academic, he’s going to be leading a lot of people astray. So it seems like it’d be wise to address the matter.

Here’s the bit where he states the options as he sees them:

So, the way I see it, there are three different ways to read this text based on Greek grammatical rules.

So. The first is just reading this as saying ‘the Word was God’. Basically like, we're talking about God, you know, ... the one true God. ...

The second way to read this would be to say that θεός here is actually functioning as a way to signify that the Word was ‘divine’ or ‘godlike in quality’. ...

And the third way that you could translate this is the way that the Jehovah's Witness Bible translated it, as ‘the Word was a god.’ So, this kind of sounds like you're saying it was, like, one of many, because it's indefinite.

In terms of understanding this problem, those are the three options. And all of them come from the difficulty of knowing why John left the article off here, and what that is supposed to mean — why it says, basically, ‘god’ instead of ‘the God’. That’s the question.

Cornthwaite 2025, 6:03–7:30

and then he spends several minutes talking about how the Septuagint, an ancient Greek form of the Jewish scriptures, sometimes refers to God without an article, and why that might be. His discussion involves logos theology, construct chains in Hebrew syntax, and why translators ‘chose’ to omit an article in some situations.

What the discussion doesn’t involve is Greek syntax. The answer is so much more basic. It has nothing to do with theology, and it isn’t a choice.

The ancient Greek complement: an introduction

A sentence of the form ‘A is B’ has three elements: A, also called the ‘subject’; a copulative verb, like ‘is’ or ‘was’; and B, also called a ‘complement’.

It’ll always be obvious which bit is the verb. But A and B are the same part of speech: they’ll both be nouns, or names, or some other kind of substantive. Yet they have distinct syntactical roles. So how do you tell which is which?

In English, it’s done by word order. The sequence of the three elements is fixed: A, verb, B. (Unless you’re Yoda, in which case it’s A, B, verb.) You always know that the thing that appears first is the subject, and the thing that appears later is the complement.

But in ancient Greek, the three elements can be placed in any order. Word order doesn’t tell you which is A and which is B. So the way Greek tells you which is the subject and which is the complement is by using ... (drumroll) ... an article.

The rule is very simple and universal:

• The subject, A, is indicated by the presence of an article.
• The complement, B, is indicated by the absence of an article.

Actually the rule is more general than this: it applies to all kinds of nominative predicates, not just in ‘is’ sentences, e.g. θεὸς Ἰσραὴλ πάσῃ τῇ γῇ κληθήσεται ‘he will be called the God of Israel over the whole earth’ (LXX Isaiah 54.5).

As a result, the following all mean the same thing, just with slight shifts in emphasis:

ὁ Ὅμηρος ἦν ῥαψῳδός.
ῥαψῳδός ἦν ὁ Ὅμηρος.
ὁ Ὅμηρος ῥαψῳδός ἦν.
ἦν ῥαψῳδός ὁ Ὅμηρος.
ἦν ὁ Ὅμηρος ῥαψῳδός.
ῥαψῳδός ὁ Ὅμηρος ἦν.

Homer was the rhapsode or Homer was a rhapsode.

But they swap around if you just move the article:

Ὅμηρος ἦν ὁ ῥαψῳδός.
ἦν ὁ ῥαψῳδός Ὅμηρος.

The rhapsode was Homer.

And this is all that’s going on in John 1.1 θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. λόγος has an article to show that it’s the subject; θεός has no article, to show that it’s the complement.

There’s no deep theology going on there. Well, nothing deep about the article at least — this still doesn’t tell you whether to translate θεός as ‘God’ or ‘divine’ — but that question has nothing at all to do with articles. θεός will still be a complement, so either way it won’t have an article.

Don’t believe me? Fine: here’s a standard textbook, Reading Greek, 2nd edition, published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. Here’s a snippet from the introductory chapter, Section I.

§47 in Reading Greek, JACT 2001, page 37.

Athenaze covers this too, but only by example: it doesn’t state it as an explicit general rule. It’s also explained explicitly in Smyth’s Greek grammar (Smyth 1916: 214, §784–786) and the Cambridge grammar of classical Greek (Van Emde Boas et al. 2019: 330, §28.9), but because they list some exceptions where both A and B have articles, that may give a false impression that the rule is somehow optional. (There are no exceptions about the absence of an article, which is the situation in John 1.1.) Reading Greek is refreshing because it focuses on telling the beginner the thing that they need to know.

It boggles my mind that actual scholars could have any uncertainty over this. It makes me wonder what Greek textbook is being used in Religious Studies departments.

By the way, my translation at the start isn’t ideal: a first century reader would certainly understand the metaphysical language in John 1.1 in Stoic terms, as I explained here a couple of years ago. It’s just that that would be a bit too unfamiliar to hit modern readers with right away. Someone living in the philosophical framework of the time would most naturally interpret John 1.1 as

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

In the beginning was the principle of intelligibility, and the principle of intelligibility was an attribute of God, and the principle of intelligibility was God.

John 1.1 (my preferred translation)

References

• Cornthwaite, C. J. 2025. ‘The Origins of John 1:1 will BLOW YOUR MIND! 🤯 - WARNING! Greek & Hebrew DEEP DIVE.’ ‘C. J. Cornthwaite’ channel, 3 April 2025. [Youtube]
• van Emde Boas, E.; Rijksbaron, A.; Huitink, L.; de Bakker, M. 2019. Cambridge grammar of classical Greek. Cambridge.
• JACT 2001. Reading Greek: grammar and exercises, 2nd edition. Cambridge.
• Smyth, H. W. 1916. A Greek grammar for schools and colleges. New York. [Internet Archive]

Homeric details and other influences in Nolan's The Odyssey (2026)

There are already tons of reviews of The Odyssey (2026) out there, including many by classical scholars. I’m no movie expert, so this isn’t a review. But I can sometimes spot little details and recognise where they’ve come from.

Nolan’s film diverges from Homer in major respects, but there are also points of detail that it treats more carefully than it needs to. And the film doesn’t just draw on Homer: it also uses other ancient traditions, and other past screen adaptations of The Odyssey.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Eurykleia recognises Odysseus (Attic red figure skyphos, ca. 430 BCE; Chiusi Museo Nazionale Etrusco inv. 1831; image source: Dan Diffendale, Flickr)

Homeric details

1. Odysseus grabs Eurycleia’s neck

This is the detail that suggested to me the idea of this compilation. As a courtesy to her disguised guest, Penelope assigns the enslaved Eurycleia to bathe Odysseus’ feet. Earlier in the film there was a flashback where Odysseus was wounded in the leg while hunting, and Eurycleia treated the wound: now she sees the scar, and immediately realises who the guest is.

In Homer the passage is Odyssey 19.386–502. The film has the tighter storytelling: the scar is a Chekhov’s Gun, planted ahead of time (in Homer it’s first introduced in this scene), and the film shows rather than tells (Homer has lots of dialogue between Odysseus and Eurykleia). In Homer, Eurykleia finds the scar, then (19.476–481) —

... [Eurykleia] turned her eyes towards Penelope,
intending to tell her that her husband was present in the house.
But Penelope wasn’t able to look that way or notice:
Athena turned her mind. Then Odysseus
reached and grabbed her neck in his right hand,
and with the other he pulled her closer and spoke ...

The film makes lots of well motivated changes, but still includes the minor detail of Odysseus grabbing her neck.

What the film does not do is address the morals of assaulting and endangering people like Eurycleia and Melantho who are enslaved. An informed understanding of Homer shouldn’t just understand that there’s slavery in it, but also what’s wrong with that.

Some films like Gone with the Wind or Song of the South infamously whitewash slavery as if it’s benevolent. Nolan’s The Odyssey goes further: it actively approves of brutality to slaves. When Penelope tosses Melantho into the slaughter of the suitors, that’s roughly equivalent to a modern CEO tossing a wage slave into a meat grinder for daring to apply for a job at a different company.

2. Divine interventions

Several times characters say ‘You have the eyes of Athena.’ This is slightly cringey dialogue, but it’s directly motivated by Homer’s text: it reflects incidents in the epic where Telemachos or Odysseus recognises Athena even though she’s disguised as a mortal character.

It also has the effect of incorporating the divine world into how people speak and interact. The film takes a relatively subtle approach to this: consider how it frames Athena as appearing to Odysseus in visions, rather than as a physical presence.

Zeus’ thunder works the same way. At various points the sound of rumbling thunder is heard, and on one occasion there’s a comment that Zeus apparently has an interest in the outcome of the bow contest. The divine isn’t directly present, but it’s there, hanging over the story. Compare Odyssey 21.410–413:

Taking [the bow] in his right hand, [Odysseus] tested the string:
it sang beautifully in accompaniment, like a swallow’s song.
Great fear broke out among the suitors, and all their skin
grew pale. And Zeus thundered loudly, giving an omen.

3. Approximations: the Cyclops, the ghost of Teiresias

The film’s Cyclops episode omits the dialogue between Odysseus and the Cyclops, and the ‘Nobody’ trick. It does follow Homer in a few other respects, though — though not strictly, and not realistically.

In ancient paintings, Odysseus and his men normally use a hot metal skewer to blind Polyphemos. That’s consistent with variants of this folktale in other cultures. Homer’s version is an innovation: he has them use a wooden stake, because his Cyclopes are so barbaric that they don’t cook their food. That creates a few anomalies. Homer’s wooden stake glows white-hot all the way through, it can pierce the Cyclops’ eyeball, and it’s hot enough to make it sizzle — things that would only make sense if it were, well, a metal spit. It’s a mistake. Nolan’s film faithfully reproduces Homer’s mistake.

On the metal spit, see Glenn 1971: 164–166. Page 1955: 9–12 points out some of the incongruities around the wooden stake.

Odysseus escaping underneath Polyphemus’ ram (Attic white-ground column krater, ca. 510 BCE, Sappho Painter; Karlsruhe, Badisches Landesmuseum 167; cf. Odyssey 9.415–460)

Less exact is the escape from the cave. As in Homer, the Cyclops reaches out to feel his sheep as they exit the cave, to stop Odysseus escaping. But in Homer they’re giant sheep, and the humans are tied to their bellies. On screen that would be laughably silly. So Nolan’s film settles for an approximation: the humans wear bundles of hay on their back.

The ‘underworld’ scene is another approximation. Odyssey 11 isn’t a descent to the underworld: that’s Vergil’s Aeneid, not Homer. Nolan faithfully shows Odysseus summoning the spirits of the dead above ground. Homer doesn’t say how the spirits arrive — he just says they start swarming around the pit of sheep’s blood — but Nolan’s film has them come up from the ground, emerging out of otherworldly black sand.

The setting envisaged in Homer is a nekyomanteion, or ‘oracle of the dead’. Real nekyomanteia were sacred places by a body of water, or in a cave, where visitors could commission a ritual to consult dead spirits as an oracle. There were four famous nekyomanteia: one at a purported ‘Acherousian lake’ on the river Acheron in Epeiros, Greece; one by lake Averno in Campania, Italy, near Cumae; and two in caves, at Heracleia Pontica and Cape Tainaron.

In the 1900s it was sometimes assumed that the lakeside nekyomanteia also had cave-based rituals: some archaeologists suggested identifying them with underground locations. That’s very doubtful, as Daniel Ogden shows. Certainly Aischylos’ play the Psychagogoi envisaged Odysseus’ consultation of Teiresias as taking place literally at the shore of a lake.

The four nekyomanteia and their locations: Ogden 2001: 17–28. Aeschylus’ lakeside psychagogia: fr. 273a ed. Radt. Sotírios Dákaris proposed localising the Acherousian nekyomanteion at a Hellenistic site with an underground crypt at Mesopotamo, Parga, about 4 km from the mouth of the Acheron; R. F. Paget tentatively suggested a cave complex in the hillside of Baiae for the Avernan nekyomanteion.

Homer equivocates between Acheron and Averno. Circe’s instructions refer to the rivers Kokytos and Acheron (10.513–514); but when Odysseus arrives, it sounds much more like Cumae — he’s next to the sea, and Cimmerians live there (11.13–21). Regardless, Nolan’s film faithully reads Odysseus’ consultation as taking place near a shore.

Ogden 2001: 61–74 argues in favour of a setting at Averno. Averno was the only nekyomanteion to have resident staff, including a group known as ‘Cimmerians’.

It’s standard in ancient vase paintings for spirits to come up out of the ground, including in paintings of Odysseus. That isn’t explicit in Homer, but Nolan’s film reproduces it anyway. In one vase painting, the ghost of Elpenor is surrounded by plants, indicating a setting above ground. (Elpenor isn’t in the film: he’s faintly ridiculous in Homer, so Nolan wisely replaces him with Sinon, creating a much weightier scene.)

Left: Odysseus and Elpenor. Right: Odysseus and Teiresias (only Teiresias’ head is above ground). (Left: Attic pelike, Lykaon Painter, ca. 440 BCE; Boston Mus. Fine Arts 34.79; cf. Odyssey 11.51–83. Right: south Italian kalyx krater, Dolon Painter?, ca. 370 BCE; Paris Bibl. Nat. Cab. de Méd. 422; cf. Odyssey 11.90–149). Both scenes have Odysseus accompanied by Hermes, who is not present in Homer. Hermes may possibly have been present in a lost Attic tragedy on the episode, notably Aischylos’ Psychagogoi, which was about Odysseus’ consultation of Teiresias: the Chorus addresses Hermes in Aischylos fr. 273a ed. Radt (cf. Sophokles fr. 748 ed. Radt, from an unknown play, which refers to the nekyomanteion at Averno).

Material from other ancient traditions

I’ve already mentioned the spirits coming up out of the ground, which isn’t in Homer’s text. Here are some more incidents where the film draws on material that is ancient, but not in Homer:

• The suitor Eurymachus beats a staff on the ground while performing oral poetry. This is partially in accordance with ancient accounts of rhapsodic performance. Ancient rhapsodes beat in time to their chant (hence thesis and arsis, ‘placing’ and ‘lifting’, a literal downbeat and upbeat); Eurymachus beats his staff in between phrases, more like punctuation.
• Sinon and Troy going up in flames aren’t Homeric stories. Sinon is a later addition to the legend, of uncertain date; the fire imagery is from Vergil’s Aeneid (and other later accounts). It’s basically compulsory for modern depictions of the fall of Troy to fill it with fire imagery: Vergil actually drew that motif from the Romans’ sack of Carthage in 146 BCE.
• Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon in the bathtub is from Aischylos’ play Agamemnon (458 BCE) and from ancient vase paintings depicting the murder. In Homer, it’s Klytaimestra’s lover Aigisthos that kills Agamemnon, at a feast at Aigisthos’ house (Odyssey 11.405–426).
• Odysseus’ exile isn’t in ancient epics (unless you believe Reinhold Merkelbach’s theories about the Telegony, 1969: 148–150). But it is in two (para-)mythographic sources. Both of them have a legal dispute between Odysseus and the suitors’ families, and Achilleus’ son Neoptolemos is called to act as arbitrator. In Plutarch’s Quaestiones graecae (Moralia 294c–d), Neoptolemos judges that the suitors’ families must pay annual damages to Odysseus, but in turn, Odysseus is exiled to Italy. In the pseudo-Apollodoran Library, epitome 7.40, Neoptolemos uses his position to gain control of Odysseus’ property on Kephallenia, and Odysseus is exiled to Aitolia (on the Greek mainland). Some scholars think that ‘Italy’ in the Plutarch passage is a textual corruption for ‘Aitolia’, but both stories reflect different traditions about Odysseus’ later life and burial place: some ancient sources put Odysseus’ grave in Thesprotia, others put it in Cortona, Italy.
• Circe and her sister. In the film, Circe keeps her sister in bird form in a cage. A bit of irony here: one ancient source does give Kirke a sister, but in that source, the sister is none other than Kalypso. The source is a para-novelistic account of the Trojan War known as ‘Diktys of Crete’, a pseudonymous author who narrates an ‘eyewitness’ account of the war (the text actually dates to the late 1st or early 2nd century CE). In ‘Diktys’, Kirke and Kalypso are sisters who rule over neighbouring islands, as priestesses of Helios and Selene respectively. They hate each other, to the point where Kalypso keeps a standing army ready for war.

The ‘Latin Dictys’ doesn’t preserve the detail of Kirke and Kalypso being sisters: ‘Latin Dictys’ book 6 is only an epitome. This detail is preserved in several Byzantine adaptations that drew directly on the lost original: John Malalas, Chronographia 5.19 ed. Thurn (117–120 Dindorf); John of Antioch fr. 24.10 ed. Müller (part of fr. 48.2 Roberto); Georgios Kedrenos 232,21–23 (132d) ed. Bekker; Palatine Odyssey hypothesis 5,2–25 ed. Dindorf.

Material from other modern adaptations

Some elements in Nolan’s film are conspicuously based on other modern adaptations of The Odyssey.

Telemachus’ recognition of Odysseus

In Nolan’s film, Telemachus deduces Odysseus’ identity when he sees the aged dog Argos recognise his old master. Argos is so debilitated that all he can do is wag his tail. In Homer, Odysseus revealed himself to Telemachos earlier on, back at Eumaios’ farm.

The best boy of the 1954 film (name and breed not recorded)

Long-time fans of Odyssey films, though, will recall that this is a close imitation of the scene in the Kirk Douglas Ulysses from 1954. There, Ulysses talks to Argos (who is remarkably healthy for a 20+ year old dog) and reminds the dog of how they used to go hunting together. Telemachus overhears him and puts two and two together.

The arrangement of the axes

In both Homer and the film, the bow contest involves firing an arrow through twelve axes. I’ve seen a number of comments on social media complaining that the film gets this wrong: Odysseus is supposed to be firing through holes in the axe heads, or in the handles, or something, but the film has the axes arranged in six pairs, and the ‘holes’ he shoots through are the gaps between each pair of axes.

The vanity card for the film financing company TSG Entertainment is just one possible interpretation of how the axes are set up for the bow contest.

Different scholars have proposed a number of different arrangements for the axes. Most of them would make the feat impossible for one reason or another.

The reason for the doubt is that Homer doesn’t actually tell us how they’re arranged, and doesn’t mention any holes at all. He just says the task is to ‘shoot through the iron’; and that Odysseus’ arrow passes ‘through all the axes from the first shaft’. There’s no such thing as a version of this scene that’s faithful to Homer, because Homer doesn’t describe what’s going on.

Arrangements for the axes suggested by (1) Page 1973: 112 fig. 6; (2) Page 1973: 101 fig. 3; (3) Delebecque 1975: 59 fig. 3; (4) Pocock 1961: 349 fig. 1.

Personally I prefer Walter Burkert’s interpretation (1973), as I mentioned a few years ago: the arrow literally passes through the iron, just as Homer says, penetrating each iron axe head. Arrows can certainly penetrate sheets of metal, and there are depictions of New Kingdom Egyptian pharaohs shooting arrows through metal plates. Odysseus’ feat is simply a superhuman version of this. Remember the first part of the task is to string the bow: the bow contest is supposed to be a feat of extraordinary strength.

But Nolan’s set-up isn’t a new invention for the film. It’s actually borrowed from an anime series. Back in 1981–1982, in Ulysses 31, the titular space-age Ulysses travelled back in time to encounter his namesake, and participated in the bow contest in his place. And guess how the axes were arranged?

Still from Ulysses 31, episode 24 (1982)

References

• Bekker, I. 1838. Georgius Cedrenus Ioannis Scylitzae ope, vol. 1. Bonn. [Internet Archive]
• Burkert, W. 1973. ‘Von Amenophis II. Zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus.’ Grazer Beiträge 1: 69–78.
• Delebecque, É. 1975. ‘Le jeu de l’arc de l’Odyssée.’ In: Bingen, J.; Cambier, G.; Nachtergael, G. (eds.) Le monde grec. Pensée, littérature, histoire, documents. Hommages à Claire Préaux. Brussels. 56–67.
• Dindorf, L. 1881. Ioannis Malalae Chronographia. Bonn. [Internet Archive]
• Dindorf, W. 1855. Scholia graeca in Homeri Odysseam, vol. 1. Oxford. [Internet Archive]
• Glenn, J. 1971. ‘The Polyphemus folktale and Homer’s Kyklopeia.’ Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 102: 133–181. [JSTOR]
• Merkelbach, R. 1969 [1959]. Untersuchungen zur Odyssee, 2nd edition. Munich.
• Müller, K. 1851. Fragmenta historicorum graecorum, vol. 4. Paris. [Internet Archive]
• Ogden, D. 2001. Greek and Roman necromancy. Princeton. [Internet Archive]
• Page, D. L. 1955. The Homeric Odyssey. Oxford.
• —— 1973. Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. Cambridge, MA.
• Pocock, L. G. 1961. ‘The arrow and the axe-heads in The Odyssey.’ American Journal of Philology 82.4: 346–357. [JSTOR]
• Radt, S. 1977. Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta [TrGF]. Vol. 4. Sophocles. Göttingen.
• —— 1985. Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta [TrGF]. Vol. 3. Aeschylus. Göttingen.
• Roberto, U. 2005. Ioannis Antiocheni fragmenta ex Historia chronica. Berlin.
• Thurn, H. 2000. Ioannis Malalae Chronographia. Berlin/New York.