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 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. Heidelb. 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. Heidelb. 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): 0a, 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
• 1 violation of Varro’s Bridge (avoidance of a word ending in beat 6 unless it is a monosyllable – or disyllable ⏑⏑): 32
• 1 violation of Tiedke-Meyer’s Law (avoidance of a word/phrase with the rhythm – ⏕ – in beats 7–9): 44
• (no violations of 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]

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, 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; 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); 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.

Naming the days of the week

Ever wondered where the weekday names come from? The answer may go back a bit further than you think. But it’s also incomplete.

The easy part of the answer is that the days are named after the seven planets. Not the modern solar system, though. The planets as they were known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy. And in English, six of the seven planet names were swapped out, and Old English words or gods’ names put in. But the idea’s the same.

Sunday. Sun; relief of Sol (Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome)

Planet	Roman name	Old English	Modern English
Sun	dies Solis	Sunne	Sunday
Moon	dies Lunae	Mōna	Monday
Mars	dies Martis	Tiw (~Týr)	Tuesday
Mercury	dies Mercurii	Wōden (~Odin)	Wednesday
Jupiter	dies Iovis	Þonar (~Thor)	Thursday
Venus	dies Veneris	Frīg (~Frigg)	Friday
Saturn	dies Saturni	—	Saturday

In antiquity the Sun and Moon were frequently counted among the planets because, like the planets, they travel along the ecliptic relative to the fixed stars. Sometimes ancient writers talk of seven planets (including Sun and Moon), sometimes just five.

That’s the easy bit. I think the more interesting questions are:

1. When did Greco-Roman gods get attached to the seven day cycle?
2. Why are they in that order?

Monday. Moon (CambridgeInColour.com); Luna in chariot (Arch of Constantine, Rome)

Roman weekday names

The weekday names apparently arrived in Rome in the late 1st century BCE. The earliest reference to a day bearing one of the modern names is in the elegiac poet Tibullus, in a poem dating to the early 20s BCE.

aut ego sum causatus aves aut omina dira
      Saturnive sacram me tenuisse diem.

I used birds or bad omens as a pretext,
      or that the day sacred to Saturn detained me.

Tibullus 1.3.17–18

Petronius’ Satyrica alludes to all seven planets being associated with weekdays. However, the date of the Satyrica is in some doubt these days. It used to be dated to the reign of Nero (54–68 CE), but some scholars now think it’s a 2nd century novel.

... two timetables were posted, one on each doorpost. One of them, if I recall correctly, had this note: ‘third day and day before Kalends of January [30–31 December]: our C. dines out.’ The other depicted the course of the moon and paintings of the seven stars.

Petronius, Satyrica 30

The modern sequence of days appears in two graffiti no later than 79 CE, found at Pompeii. One is in Greek; the other, in Latin, omits Wednesday. Both graffiti start the week on Saturday.

θεων ημερας | κρονου | ηλιου | σεληνης | αρεως | ε[ρ]μου | διος | [αφρο]δειτης
Days of the gods: (day of) Kronos, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite

Mau 1881: 30

saturni | solis | lunae | martis | iovis | veneris
(day of) Saturn, Sol, Luna, Mars, Jupiter, Venus

Sogliano 1901: 330

Note. These and some further references are helpfully compiled by Schürer 1905: 25–34.

A graffito similar to the second has been found in Tunisia at Thuburbo Maius, not far from Carthage (IL Tun. 710 = Merlin 1944: 126), but that’s probably a couple of centuries later. It too starts the week on Saturday. The canonical sequence of seven appears in many later writers — including a short 4th century poem by Ausonius. In Ausonius, the week now begins on Sunday.

Some of these later writers were puzzled by the order. Plutarch, in the 2nd century, devoted a section of his Table talk to the question ‘Why they name the days after planets but number them differently from their sequence’ (Plutarch, Moralia 672c). Unfortunately that part of the Table talk is lost.

Tuesday. Mars (Fvalk.com); C. F. von Saltza, ‘Týr’ (F. Sander, Edda Sämund den vises, Stockholm, 1893, p. 78)

The order of the seven (or five) planets

The five planets, aside from the Sun and Moon, are the ones that are visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (Theoretically Uranus is too — occasionally, and with a keen eye. But only for a rather Simpsons-esque sense of ‘theoretically’.)

Those who are skilled in astronomy say that there are seven bands, on which the seven stars are carried. On the highest is carried the star of Kronos; on the one after that the star of Zeus; on the third the star of Ares; on the fourth the star of the Sun; on the fifth the star of Aphrodite; on the sixth the star of Hermes; and on the seventh the star of the Moon.

Achilles, Eisagoge 16 (Maas 1898: 42,25–30)

So the standard sequence, starting from the outermost planet, is: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon.

This arrangement isn’t really ‘Ptolemaic’, or only incidentally. Ptolemy himself allowed doubt over whether the inner planets are ‘beneath’ or ‘above’ the Sun, since the Sun’s brightness makes it impossible to observe whether Venus and Mercury pass in front or behind. And he’s explicit that he can’t measure the planets’ distance, since he can’t measure any parallax. He just accepts the conventional sequence as, well, a convention.

πιθανωτέρα μᾶλλον ἡ τῶν παλαιοτέρων τάξις καταφαίνεται ...

the order assumed by the older [astronomers] appears the more plausible ..

Ptolemy, Almagest 9.1 (ii.207 Heiberg; tr. Toomer)

Some other features of the ‘Ptolemaic’ system aren’t really Ptolemaic either. Ptolemy has no word for ‘deferent’, the circular orbit on which the epicycle is centred (though he does use the concept); he doesn’t give figures for the distances of the planets. That’s all mediaeval.

Wednesday. Mercury (Cronodon.com); Ian McShane as Wednesday (promotional poster for American gods, 2017–2021)

The standard order took time to become settled. Otto Neugebauer gives a handy run-down of the different sequences seen in different ancient cultures and different ancient authors (1975: 690–693). Some of them omit the Sun and Moon; some are reversed; some omit Jupiter and Saturn. His verdict is that no standard order existed prior to the time of Hipparchos, in the 2nd century BCE.

Egyptian	Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars
older Babylonian	Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars
Persian/Hellenistic era Babylonian	Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Mars
Archimedes according to ps-Hippolytos Refutatio 4.7–11	Moon, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, fixed stars
Plutarch On generation 1028b (Pythagorean)	Central fire, Counter-earth, Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun
Plutarch On generation 1029b	Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
‘some’ according to Achilles, apparently including Eratosthenes (Maass 1898: 42,30–43,2)	[Mars], Venus, Mercury, Sun, [Moon]
‘others’ according to Achilles (ibid.)	[Mars], Mercury, Sun, Venus, [Moon]
Eudoxos papyrus, inscription of Keskinto	Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus
Vitruvius Architecture 9.1.5	Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
Ptolemy Almagest 9.1, Cicero On divination 2.91–92, Pliny Natural history 2.34–44	Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon
Cicero On the nature of the gods 2.52–53	Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury
(Indian) Varāhamihira Pancha-siddhantika 13.39 (i.121 Neugebauer-Pingree)	Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, nakṣatras

(Notice, by the way, that Vitruvius and the 6th century Indian astronomer Varāhamihira have the same sequence as Ptolemy, but reversed; so do Cicero and Plutarch, reversing one another, but both omitting the Sun and Moon.)

In spite of the variation, and the fact that Ptolemy regarded the sequence as purely conventional, the ‘Ptolemaic’ sequence came to be universally regarded as the standard order. Ptolemy calls it ‘the order of previous astronomers’ (ἡ τῶν παλαιοτέρων τάξις), but as mentioned above, it’s inconsistent with pre-2nd century BCE sequences, Neugebauer suggests that no sequence existed until around the time of Hipparchos.

Thursday. Jupiter (Aol.com); Chris Hemsworth as Thor (promotional poster for Thor: the dark world, 2013)

The order of the weekdays

Here’s how the planets get reordered into weekdays, starting with Saturn, as in Ptolemy and the Pompeii graffiti.

We don’t actually have any good evidence on why this reordering happened. It clearly isn’t random, though: notice how for each weekday, you skip two planets — or conversely, for each planet, you skip four weekdays

One modern book on the history of the week, by Eviatar Zerubavel, favours a theory based on the premise that Egyptian astronomers assigned each of the planets to hours of the day (1985: 14–17); however, everything about this theory is hypothetical. It’s claimed by an ancient author, as we’ll see below, but not a very trustworthy author. It can’t be corroborated as anything more than, well, some ancient guy making guesses.

There are three ancient theories on record, including the one Zerubavel prefers. Personally I think all three are pretty tenuous. The lost essay by Plutarch that I mentioned above may have had a fourth explanation, but alas, we’ll never know what it was.

Friday. Venus (Deepsky2000.com); C. E. Doepler, ‘Frigg and her handmaidens’ (W. Wägner, Nordisch-germanische Götter- und Heldensagen, 3rd ed. 1882, p. 109)

The first theory comes from a 6th century Indian astronomer, Varāhamihira.

(Ascending) up from the Moon (each successive planet) is lord of the month, (descending) down from Saturn lord of the hour. (Ascending) up in order (every) fifth (planet) is lord of the day; the lords of the year are clear.

Varāhamihira, Pancha-siddhantika 13.42 (i.121 Neugebauer-Pingree)

This is simply a restatement of the pattern I mentioned: start from Moon = Monday, then for each successive day, move on five planets (counting inclusively; four, counting exclusively). Why anyone would do that, he doesn’t explain. So this is a pretty weak theory.

The second and third are found in Dion Cassius (3rd century CE). He attributes them both to ‘the Egyptians’, which is ... doubtful, to say the least. But let’s hear him out. Here’s theory number two:

For if you apply the so-called ‘principle of the tetrachord’ (which is believed to constitute the basis of music) to these stars, by which the whole universe of heaven is divided into regular intervals, in the order in which each of them revolves, and beginning at the outer orbit assigned to Saturn, then omitting the next two name the lord of the fourth, and after this passing over two others reach the seventh, and you then go back and repeat the process with the orbits and their presiding divinities in this same manner, assigning them to the several days, you will find all the days to be in a kind of musical connection with the arrangement of the heavens.

Dion Cassius 37.18 (tr. Cary)

The tetrachord was indeed the basic element of ancient Greek music: it was a sequence of four notes, spanning an interval of what we would call a perfect fourth (a frequency ratio of 4:3). That is, this theory is that you rotate through the planets in the same way that musical keys modulate through a cycle of fifths.

That isn’t as crazy as it might sound. These are all real things: the tetrachord, the Pythagorean preoccupation with perfect harmonic intervals, and the idea that the planets are tied up with musical theory in some way. Unfortunately we know basically nothing about Pythagoreanism in the 1st century BCE, so we have no way of deciding whether this theory is plausible, or completely daft.

Saturday. Saturn (UniverseToday.com); relief of Saturnus from altar of Malakbel (Palmyra, Syria), Musei Capitolini, Rome (Wikimedia.org)

Here’s theory number three, also from Dion Cassius:

If you begin at the first hour to count the hours of the day and of the night, assigning the first to Saturn, the next to Jupiter, the third to Mars, the fourth to the Sun, the fifth to Venus, the sixth to Mercury, and the seventh to the Moon, according to the order of the cycles which the Egyptians observe, and if you repeat the process, covering thus the whole twenty-four hours, you will find that the first hour of the following day comes to the Sun. And if you carry on the operation throughout the next twenty-four hours in the same manner as with the others, you will dedicate the first hour of the third day to the Moon, and if you proceed similarly through the rest, each day will receive its appropriate god.

Dion Cassius 37.19 (tr. Cary)

This one depends on the premise that each hour of the day is assigned to a planet, and that they’re assigned in the Ptolemaic order.

Day	Day begins at hour	Associated planet
1	1	Saturn
2	25	Sun
3	49	Moon
4	73	Mars
5	97	Mercury
6	121	Jupiter
7	145	Venus
8	169	Saturn

and so on. This sounds kind of plausible. It also has the advantage of predicting Saturday as the first day of the week, which is exactly what we see in early sources like the Pompeii graffiti.

There are problems, however. First, there’s no corroboration in anything we know about Egyptian astronomy for the idea of assigning planets to hours. It could easily be a figment of Dion’s imagination.

Second, Egyptian astronomy is characterised much more by a division of the day (and night) into 12 hours, not 24. According to Robert Hannah, the concept of the 12 hour day is precisely of Egyptian origin (2005: 87). As Herodotos puts it,

But as far as human affairs are concerned, [the priests in Egypt] agreed on this: that the Egyptians were the first to discover the year, and the division of it into twelve seasonal segments; and they discovered this from the stars, as they said. ... They also said the Egyptians were the first to refer to a canon of twelve gods, and that the Greeks adopted this from them ...

Herodotos 2.4 (my emphasis)

(A 12 hour cycle would produce the same result, if we start from the Moon and work our way out. But then we lose the advantage of matching early sources by outputting Saturday as the first day of the week.)

And third, what we do find in actual Egyptian astronomy is the idea of associating hours with specific stars or constellations, not planets.

The hours became associated with certain stars or star groups which rose heliacally at ten-day intervals through the year. Sirius was one of these, and it was joined by 35 other stars ... Collectively they are now known as the ‘decans’ ...

Hannah 2005: 87

This produced a system of ten-day weeks in a seven-week cycle, not a cycle of seven days. Theory number three gives every appearance of being a post hoc rationalisation of the weekday names, not a true explanation.

None of the three theories has any corroboration. Theory 1 is certainly the weakest. But the mismatch between theory 3 and what is actually known about Egyptian astronomy is so glaring that I think it has to be rejected almost as strongly.

The weird result is that the Pythagorean explanation — theory 2, rotating between the planets in musical tetrachords — is the strongest.

Not that it’s a good theory, mind. It sounds quite daft to me. It’s just that, as things stand, we don’t have anything to rule it out.

References

• Hannah, R. 2005. Greek & Roman calendars. Constructions of time in the classical world. London.
• Maass, E. 1898. Commentariorum in Aratum reliquiae. Berlin. [Internet Archive]
• Mau, A. 1881. ‘Scavi di Pompei.’ Bullettino dell’Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica 1881,i–ii: 22–32. [Internet Archive]
• Merlin, A. 1944. Inscriptions latines de la Tunisie. Paris.
• Neugebauer, O. 1975. A history of ancient mathematical astronomy. Berlin/Heidelberg.
• Schürer, E. 1905. ‘Die siebentägige Woche im Gebrauche der christlichen Kirche der ersten Jahrhunderte.’ Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 6: 1–66. [Zenodo]
• Sogliano, A. 1901. ‘Regione I (Latium et Campania).’ In: Notizie degli scavi di antichità comunicate alla R. Accademia dei Lincei, anno 1901, s.v. ‘Luglio 1901’. Rome. 329–333. [Internet Archive]
• Zerubavel, E. 1985. The seven day circle. The history and meaning of the week. Chicago.

Textual errors in Lassus' Prophetiae Sibyllarum

It isn’t often that I get to combine my interests as a choral singer and a classicist. Recently I got interested in the Prophetiae Sibyllarum or ‘Sibylline prophecies’ by Roland de Lassus, also known as Orlando di Lasso. These are twelve short pieces for unaccompanied choir, in Latin, composed around 1560.

This story is about how I noticed an error in the text.

Lassus’ pieces are startling, polytonal, chromatic compositions. They’re not often performed. Here’s a selection of scores on the International Music Score Library. And here’s a 1994 recording by the German group Cantus Cölln.

Roland de Lassus

Why Cantus Cölln, rather than one of the more recent recordings by De Labyrintho (2007), Vocalconsort Berlin (2015), or La Main Harmonique (2022)?

Because the Cantus Cölln recording is one of the few to use the correct text. The others all use a faulty text. So does every score hosted by the Choral Public Domain Library. But then, if everyone used the Bärenreiter edition (Schlötter 1990), we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Dactylic hexameter

As I went through the Prophetiae, I slowly realised that the text uses an ancient verse form called dactylic hexameter, the same metre used in ancient epic and oracular verse. The poems that Lassus has set aren’t ancient: the text was written around 1500. Some neo-Latin poets in the modern era have used dactylic hexameter — John Milton, for example — but this was my first time hearing hexameter in Renaissance choral music.

It was in the fourth movement, the ‘Cimmerian Sibyl’, that things went horribly wrong.

In teneris annis facie insignis honore ...

Of tender years, with glorious face, in honour ...

This text is impossible.

Hexameter is supposed to have a steady — ⏑⏑ pulse (or in musical notation, 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮). The problem is with the words facie insignis. At the place in the line where they sit, they ought to have the rhythm ⏑⏑ — — — ⏑. But they don’t. They can’t.

Latin hexameter has strict rules. One of those rules is that the last syllable of facie has to be abbreviated: faci’ insignis. The text of the Prophetiae Sibyllarum follows that rule rigidly elsewhere. But then facie insignis has the rhythm ⏑⏑ — — ⏑. And that isn’t hexameter.

Is it possible that most of the time the poet had a detailed, skilled knowledge of the intricacies of Latin dactylic hexameter, but when it came to this one line, everything suddenly went pear-shaped?

No, of course not. It’s a textual error. And it isn’t Lassus’ error: he got it right. It’s every edition from 1600 up until 1979 that got it wrong. I find it wild that in that period not a single editor noticed the problem.

The Sibylline oracles

It’d be wise to fill in some background here. There are real ancient poems called the Sibylline oracles, but these are not they. The poems set by Lassus are modern.

The ancient Oracles are a set of Judaeo-Christian poems ranging from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE. They too are in dactylic hexameter, but the ancient poems are in Greek, and they’re hundreds of lines long. They’re fascinating poems in their own right. They present themselves as being prophecies spoken by actual oracles, prophesying Jewish history, the coming of Christ, the end times, and so on.

Michelangelo didn’t include the Cimmerian Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling: here’s the Libyan Sibyl instead, along with her counterpart in the 1505 edition. (sources: Barbieri ca. 1505, ch. 3; Wikimedia.org)

From late antiquity onward, Christian readers sometimes assumed the poems genuinely were oracular pronouncements. As a result, both the poems and the Sybils acquired a lot of Christian street cred. The Sibyls were reckoned among the virtuous heathen because they supposedly foretold the coming of Christ.

Some ancient Christian writers celebrated them, especially Lactantius, so their fame came to be independent of the Greek poems. Long after the ancient poems faded from public consciousness, the Sibyls continued to enjoy celebrity status.

This is why the legendary Sibyls appear among Michelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, alongside prophets of the Hebrew Bible. They all get counted as forerunners to Christianity, preparing the way of the Lord.

In the late 1400s, a tract by the Italian humanist Filippo Barbieri gave a tally of twelve famous Sibyls. Barbieri’s tract was the occasion for the first appearance of the short Latin poems that Lassus ended up using in his choral setting. An article by Peter Bergquist (1979) traces the poems to an edition of Barbieri’s tract published around 1505, titled Quattuor hic compressa opuscula (‘four short works compiled here’). This 1505 edition has engravings of the twelve Sibyls, and adds the poems as captions, on facing pages.

Note. Some online facsimiles: Barberi ca. 1505; Birck 1555, an edition of the ancient Sibylline oracles which includes the Latin poems as an appendix; Lassus ca. 1560, the manuscript of Lassus’ choral settings, soprano alto tenor bass (the Prophetiae are around p. 50, with different pagination in each part); and Lassus 1600, the first publication of Lassus’ choral settings (soprano and bass parts). I haven’t been able to trace an online facsimile of Birck’s 1545 edition of the ancient Oracles, which reportedly contains the neo-Latin poems too: Google Books claims to have copies (1 2), but they’re mislabelled.

The unmetrical hexameter

Here’s the faulty text that is used in every copy on the CPDL website, and on nearly every recording: De Labyrintho (2007), Vocalconsort Berlin (2015), Trinity College Music Society (2021), and La Main Harmonique (2022). They all sing the text that Lassus didn’t write. Textual errors are underlined and in bold.

In teneris annis facie insignis honore
Militiae aeternae regem sacra virgo cibavit
Lacte suo, per quem gaudebunt pectore summo
Omnia, et Eoo lucebit sydus ab ore
Mirificum. Sua dona magi cum laude ferentes
Objicient puero myrrham, aurum, thura Sabaea.

And here’s the correct text, as Lassus wrote it (but with some punctuation added), based on the tenor part in the manuscript, with my translation.

In teneris annis facie praesignis honore
militiae aeternae regem sacra virgo cibabit
lacte suo, per quem gaudebunt pectore summo
omnia, et Eoo lucebit sydus ab orbe
mirificum. sua dona Magi cum laude ferentes
obijcient puero myrrham, aurum, thura Sabea.

Of tender years, with glorious face, in honour,
the sacred virgin will feed the king of the eternal host
with her milk. All things will rejoice in him
with uplifted heart, and from the eastern sphere will shine a star
of wonder. The Magi will bring their gifts with praise
and offer them to the boy: myrrh, gold, (and) Sabaean incense.

There are actually several textual errors. The simple ones are:

• Line 2 cibavit: should be future tense cibabit (‘the virgin will feed’, not ‘has fed’).
• Line 4 ore: should be orbe (‘from the eastern sphere’ (that is, the eastern sky), not ‘eastern face’).
• Line 6 objicient: should be obijcient (same meaning, but different pronunciation with a Dutch diphthong).
• Line 6 Sabaea: should be Sabea (this one is just a spelling variation).

Lassus’ manuscript is held in Vienna at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus.Hs. 18744. All four parts have orbe in line 4 and obijcient in line 6. Cibavit is Lassus’ own error: he correctly wrote cibabit in the tenor part, but cibavit in the soprano, alto, and bass parts.

The variation objicient–obijcient is a feature of Dutch pronunciation, but could alternatively be regarded as a philosophical difference. Objicient is more linguistically sound, and it appears in the 1555 edition of the poem and in the Lassus texts of Bergquist (1979) and Schlötter (1990). But in the manuscript it’s clear that obijcient is the intended spelling, and is also what appears (correctly) in the 1600 edition. Most likely Lassus was using an edition that had obiicient, which is how the 1505 edition prints it.

But it’s line 1 facie insignis that set me on this trail. Take a look at the following scansions. Macron and breve marks (— and ⏑) represent long and short syllables in the hexameter (not the rhythms used in Lassus’ setting); the anceps mark at line-end (×) indicates indifferent syllable length.

(a) The rhythm of dactylic hexameter. (b) The first line from Lassus’ prelude movement, scanned, and illustrating elision on quae. (c) The faulty first line from the ‘Sibylla Cimmerica’ movement in two possible interpretations, one with hiatus, the other observing elision.

I also give the first line from Lassus’ prelude movement (‘The songs you hear, modulated with a chromatic tenor ...’) to illustrate how the words should correspond to the hexameter rhythm, and also to illustrate the correct observance of elision. The text of this opening movement is likely by Lassus himself. Notice incidentally that this line is what metrical stylists call a ‘golden line’, in the form noun A adjective B verb adjective A noun B. It’s clearly calculated to show off Lassus’ skill with Latin verse, as well as with music.

The scansion of the line from the fourth movement shows that the rhythm cannot possibly correspond to the hexameter rhythm, whether facie is elided or not.

The correct reading is facie praesignis, which is similar in meaning: ‘with exceptionally glorious face’, as opposed to insignis ‘with glorious face’. It doesn’t suffer from the problems with insignis:

• Praesignis starts with a consonant, so there’s no need to worry about elision.
• Another principle of hexameter is that any vowel followed by a consonant cluster is treated as metrically long. So before the pr- of praesignis, facie acquires a long final syllable, and the phrase has the correct metrical rhythm, ⏑⏑ — — — ⏑.

The manuscript of Lassus’ Prophetiae Sibyllarum, 4th movement, tenor part, with the correct readings clearly visible. (Vienna, Mus.Hs.18744 iii, p. 27)

There are other occasional differences between the text in Lassus’ manuscript and the poems as they appear in the 1505 and 1555 editions. Lassus’ title for his fourth movement is Sibylla Cymmeria (not Cimmeria). ‘Cimmerian Sibyl’ would be Sibylla Cimmerica, and that’s how it appears in the 1555 edition of the poem: Lassus’ title is literally just the words ‘Sibyl’ and ‘Cimmeria’, which is an infelicity. (The 1505 edition is worse: it prints Sibylla Chimeria in one place, Sibylla Chimicha in another.)

The best published text for Lassus’ settings is Bergquist’s (1979), which is also used in the Bärenreiter edition (Schlötter 1990). Even that doesn’t agree perfectly with the Lassus manuscript. Lassus uses forms like obijcient and eximij, rather than objicient and eximii, and he doesn’t usually capitalise the first letter of each hexameter line. You aren’t going to hear most of these things in performance, though objicient is audible.

The only recordings I’ve found that use the Bergquist–Bärenreiter text are the ones by Cantus Cölln (2002) and Gallicantus (2018). (The latter puts Lassus’ settings alongside some modern compositions — ‘Sibylla Clevelandiae’, ‘Sibylla Chicagonis’, and so on.) The Hilliard Ensemble recording (1998) does have the correct text, but their consonants are so under-enunciated that it takes some careful listening to tell.

References

• Barbieri, F. circa 1505. Quattuor hic compressa opuscula. ... Venice. [Internet Archive]
• Bergquist, P. 1979. ‘The poems of Orlando di Lasso’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum and their sources.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 32.3: 516–538. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Castellion, S. 1555. Σιβυλλιακῶν χρησμῶν λόγοι ὀκτώ. Sibyllinorum oraculorum libri viii. Ed. Sixt Birck (alias Xystus Betuleius), Sébastien Castellion (alias Sebastianus Castalio). Basel. [Internet Archive]
• Lassus, R. circa 1560. Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Manuscript. Vienna Mus.Hs.18744. [Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
• Lassus, R. 1600. Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Ab Orlando de Lasso, piae memoriae (Cantus, Bassus). Munich. [IMSLP.org]
• Schlötter, R. (ed.) 1990. Orlando di Lasso. Sämtliche Werke (Neue Reihe) 21. Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Kassel. [IMSLP (PDF)]

Translating gender

It’ll be no surprise that modern translations can give a slanted impression of ancient texts. This goes for gender too. (Yes, the ancient world had transgender people, non-binary people, non-gendered people, and more.)

Many people take care to use appropriate pronouns these days, but as far as I know that care hasn’t yet become a major concern in published translations. If you don’t know the languages it can be hard to see what the questions are. Here we’ll look at some relatively familiar test cases.

Athena’s pronouns in Odyssey book 1

Recently, I had a decision to make. I was writing an introduction to Odyssey book 1, one of the bits of the Odyssey where the goddess Athena appears to people as a mortal.

Specifically, as a mortal man. What are the correct pronouns to use?

Marc Chagall, ‘Athena and Telemachus’ (1975)

Is this similar to the binary gender situation that Tolkien envisages for divinities in his fictional mythology?

[T]he Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (1977)

Tolkien’s phrasing doesn’t inevitably treat gender, phenotype, and sex organs as the same thing, but it does regard gender as an essential reality, something intrinsic. Manwë is always male, no matter what he’s doing, whether he’s using a physical body or not.

On one level the Odyssey would agree. The narrator consistently uses grammatically feminine vocabulary for Athena. Here’s part of the episode. Grammatically gendered vocabulary for Athena is in bold.

ὣς εἰποῦσ’ ὑπὸ ποσσὶν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα . . .
βῆ δὲ κατ’ Οὐλύμποιο καρήνων ἀΐξασα,
στῆ δ’ Ἰθάκης ἐνὶ δήμωι ἐπὶ προθύροις Ὀδυσῆος,
οὐδοῦ ἔπ’ αὐλείου, παλάμηι δ’ ἔχε χάλκεον ἔγχος,
εἰδομένη ξείνωι, Ταφίων ἡγήτορι Μέντηι. . . .
τὴν δὲ πολὺ πρῶτος ἴδε Τηλέμαχος θεοειδής ...

So she spoke, and bound beautiful sandals beneath her feet . . .
she sped down the peaks of Olympos
and stood in the city of Ithaki, at Odysseus’ doorstep
on the threshold of the court, holding a bronze spear in hand;
she appeared like a male visitor, Mentes, leader of the Taphians. . . .
By far the first to see her was godlike Telemachos ...

Odyssey 1.96–113 (tr. Peter Gainsford)

The participles (εἰποῦσα, ἀΐξασα, εἰδομένη) and the pronoun in line 113 (τήν ‘her’) are all feminine. There’s one clash in line 105 where we’re told that she appeared (εἰδομένη, feminine) like a male visitor (ξείνωι, masculine). Overall, though, it looks like there’s an intrinsic femininity to the character.

But on another level, Athena isn’t a woman wearing drag. When Athena puts on male sexual organs, Athena intends to pass as male. Athena does pass as male. Other characters consistently identify Athena as male, and they aren’t making a mistake.

Just to give you an idea of the gulf separating a translation from Homer’s Greek, in this passage —

... καί μιν φωνήσας ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα·
‘χαῖρε, ξεῖνε, παρ’ ἄμμι φιλήσεαι· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
δείπνου πασσάμενος μυθήσεαι ὅττεό σε χρή.’

... and addressing them, [Telemachos] spoke winged words:
‘Greetings, male visitor, you are welcome among us. And later,
after malely eating a meal, you can discuss whatever you want.’

Odyssey 1.122–124 (tr. Peter Gainsford)

— modern translators do the exact opposite of what Homer does. They can’t resist using gendered vocabulary in line 122, and non-gendered vocabulary in 123–124.

... and let his words fly out to her.
                    ‘Good evening,
stranger, and welcome. Be our guest, come share
our dinner, and then tell us what you need.’

Odyssey 1.122–124 (tr. Emily Wilson)

In line 122 the narrator uses the gender-neutral μιν ‘them’; in 123–124 Telemachos uses masculine language. If the narrator had used a feminine τήν ‘her’ in 122 instead of μιν (which would be metrically equivalent), the mismatch would be more jarring: it’d be telegraphing that Telemachos is misgendering Athena. But Homer doesn’t do that. Telemachos isn’t making a mistake.

What to do? The important thing, I take it, is to avoid cisnormativity. When talking about the scene, I decided to use the non-binary singular pronouns that English has now adopted as standard — ‘they, their, them’ — and when translating, to use gendered language where Homer does.

It’s especially important to think about gender here, because in recent years Odyssey book 1 has become iconic for its portrayal of ancient Greek misogyny. The scene where Telemachos berates his mother Penelope for speaking isn’t just about depriving women of their voice: it’s also shocking for the way it ogles feminine distress. Penelope has guests in her home throw her grief in her face, she gets silenced by Telemachos, is sexually harassed by the suitors yelling about how they’d like to rape her, and finally she’s stalked by the narrator as she leaves and cries her eyes out in her room.

If we’re going to be honest and treat that scene as — to put it mildly — problematic, then we’d best be honest about Athena too.

My chapter is coming out later this year in the Oxford critical guide to the Odyssey edited by Joel Christensen.

Teiresias’ genders and phenotypes

Athena’s gender in Odyssey 1 isn’t an isolated situation. Ancient myths are full of figures and scenarios that translate into modern terms as transgender or non-binary.

In another myth, the seer Teiresias is changed from male to female by divine intervention, then from female to male. It’s quite clear that the idea is that changing phenotypes is the same thing as changing gender. When Teiresias is biologically male he’s a ‘he’, when she’s biologically female she’s a ‘she’.

For Teiresias gender isn’t a choice, it’s force majeure, as it is for most modern trans people. Note where the force majeure comes from: it isn’t Teiresias’ biology that imposes their gender changes, it’s the gods.

Literary treatments of Teiresias’ story vary a great deal in how they deal with gender. Tennyson basically ignores the gender changing: he essentially pretends it never happened. Ovid and Eliot explore the gender changes but are narrowly focused on the act of sex. Ovid equates Teiresias’ femininity with sexual pleasure; Eliot, with rape.

Note. Tennyson, Tiresias (1885); Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.316–338 (8 CE); Eliot, The waste land part 3 (1922).

Another kind of treatment, which focuses on the force majeure involved in the story, is the 2003 film Tiresia (dir. Bertrand Bonello). Tiresia (Clara Choveaux) is a MTF prostitute who gets imprisoned by a stalker, and deprived of access to her hormone therapy. As a result she develops a more masculine phenotype (played by Thiago Telès). The stalker rejects her, blinds her, and abandons her, as she begins to realise she has a gift of premonition.

Teiresias changes gender, yet in a sense they’re always cis. Their phenotype at any given moment is cis for how they identify, but from time to time the gods change both the phenotype and the gender identity. Something similar goes for Caeneus, who is FTM (again by divine intervention) and who identifies and presents as male. In supernatural scenarios like these it can be challenging to find an adequate way to talk about the relationship between sexual organs, sexual phenotype, and gender identity, in ways that are also sensitive to what the story is going to mean to modern people. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Attis’ pronouns in Catullus 63

The Latin language tends to be sparser in its grammatical representation of gender. It has even fewer pronouns than ancient Greek — far fewer than modern English. Latin relies almost exclusively on participles and adjectives.

Beginners often read Catullus as their first Latin author. Poem 63 — one of his ‘long’ poems (not all that long: 93 lines) — tells the story of the semi-divine Attis, a mortal who becomes the consort of the Phrygian goddess Cybele.

Cybele and Attis (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Venezia)

The name ‘Attis’ has a feminine ring to it: compare Ovid’s feminine Caenis, masculine Caeneus. In Greek the name varies between Áttis (sounding feminine) and Áttēs (decidedly masculine). A late poem refers to ‘half-female Attis’ using a masculine article: τὸν ἡμίθηλυν Ἄττιν (Anakreontea 11.2). Occasionally modern readers have confused Áttis with Atthís, meaning ‘Athenian woman’, and also the name of one of Sappho’s lovers.

In Catullus, Attis starts out as Greek, mortal, and male, with grammatically masculine language. He travels across the sea to Phrygia. There they castrate themself, and subsequently Attis is grammatically feminine. As the poem continues her grammatical gender switches every now and then, apparently erratically, between masculine and feminine.

But these expressions of gender aren’t omnipresent, and modern translations have difficulty representing Catullus’ usage. They often have drastic mismatches in where the gendering appears.

Here are the opening lines, along with three published translations. Grammatically gendered language for Attis is in bold type. Notice how the translators all put the gendered language in different places.

Super alta vectus Attis celeri rate maria,
Phrygium ut nemus citato cupide pede tetigit
adiitque opaca silvis redimita loca deae,
stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, vagus animis,
devellit ili acuto sibi pondera silice,
itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro,
etiam recente terrae sola sanguine maculans,
niveis citata cepit manibus leve typanum,
typanum tuum, Cybebe, tua, mater, initia,
quatiensque terga tauri teneris cava digitis
canere haec suis adorta est tremebunda comitibus.

Catullus 63.1–11

5 devellit Kokoszkiewicz CQ 61.2 (2011): devolvit MS, devolsit Haupt

Over deep seas Attis, carried on a rapid catamaran,
eagerly with hurrying footsteps sought that forest in Phrygia,
penetrated the tree-thick coverts, the goddess’ shadowy habitat,
and there, by furious madness driven, wits adrift in insanity,
seized a keen flint, slashed away the weight of his groin’s double complement;
and when she felt the members left her shorn of all their virility
dropping still a spatter of fresh-shed blood on the ground as she sped along,
quickly with snow white hand she seized the lightweight rat-a-tat tympanum —
yours the tympanum, o Cybebe, yours, great Mother, the mysteries —
and on the hollow drum-skin beat a tattoo with delicate fingertips,
making this passionate invocation, body convulsed, to her followers.

(tr. Peter Green, 2005)

Attis had hastened across towering seas on a raft.
Eagerly setting his swift foot in the Phrygian grove,
he entered the goddess’s dark, forest-encircled domain
and there was attacked by insanity’s goad. Blinded by passion,
he lightened the weight of his loins with a sharp fragment of flint.
When she ascertained what was left of her limbs, lacking the male,
trickling blood on the ground from her wound, freshly inflicted,
she excitedly took in her white hands a petite tambourine,
Cybele’s horn, tool of your sacrosanct rituals, mother.
Striking the tight hide of the bull with her delicate fingers,
she shivered and started to sing words such as these to her friends.

(tr. David Mulroy, 2002)

Borne in his swift bark over deep seas, Attis, when eagerly with speedy foot he reached the Phrygian woodland, and entered the goddess’s abodes, shadowy, forest-crowned; there, goaded by raging madness, bewildered in mind, he cast down from him with sharp flint-stone the burden of his members. So when she felt her limbs to have lost their manhood, still with fresh blood dabbling the face of the ground, swiftly with snowy hands she seized the light timbrel, timbrel, trumpet of Cybele, thy mysteries, Mother, and shaking with soft fingers the hollow ox-hide thus began she to sing to her companions tremulously.

(tr. Francis Warre Cornish, 1913)

First, note that Catullus’ Latin has no gendered pronouns at all in this passage. Gender is conveyed by participles (vectus, stimulatus, citata, adorta) and adjectives (vagus, tremebunda). Line 6 sine viro (‘shorn of virility’, ‘lacking the male’, ‘lost their manhood’) is explicit gendering, rather than grammatical gender.

In the translations, not many of the gendered pronouns correspond to gendered language in Catullus’ Latin. The most striking mismatch is the lines when Attis castrates themself, in lines 5 and 6. The translations all pack these lines with gendered pronouns — but the Latin has no grammatical gendering at all!

Here’s my own effort, with gendered pronouns confined to places where Catullus uses gendered language.

He sailed over the deep — Attis, over the seas in a swift skiff —
touched the Phrygian grove, touched it eagerly with swiftened foot,
and entered the dark places of the woods, property of the goddess.
He was driven by raging ecstasy there, he was changeful in spirit;
tore off the weight from the groin using a sharp stone;
then felt what parts were left, without the male,
while staining the soil of mother earth with fresh blood.
She swiftly took the light drum in snow-white hands —
your drum, Cybebe, your sacred mysteries, mother —
and pulsing the hollow bull’s hide with tender fingers
she trembled as she began this song to the entourage.

(tr. Peter Gainsford)

Notes. 1 vectus. Catullus introduces gendered language very early on, in the third word of the poem. Among the published translations above, only the oldest, Cornish, tries to reproduce this. 2 Phrygium ... nemus; 7 terrae sola. It strikes me that Catullus is playing with mismatches in grammatical gender, so it seems important to convey them in translation where feasible. In line 2 ‘Phrygian grove’ is neuter, but nemus has a masculine-looking ending: so my translation adds ‘it’ to make it more marked. In line 7 ‘soil of mother earth’, terrae (‘of earth’) is feminine and sola (‘soil’) is neuter: I add ‘mother’ as an indirect hint at the mismatch. 3 adiitque. Green has Attis ‘penetrating’ the grove. I find that tendentious: there’s nothing especially sexual about the Latin here. 4 vagus animis. The published translations all think this suggests impaired mental function (‘wits adrift in insanity’, ‘blinded by passion’, ‘bewildered in mind’). I disagree. vagus appears again at lines 13 and 25: it’s thematic. It indicates mobility, something shifting, without an anchor. Attis’ gender is about to change, and vagus is surely a piece of framing for that event. Later, in lines 13 and 25, vaga refers to groups who are congregating and moving towards a specific place: 13 vaga pecora (‘shifting cattle’), 25 vaga cohors (‘shifting company’). It may be significant that the word has a different grammatical gender each time: vagus Attis = masculine, 13 vaga pecora (‘cattle’) = neuter, 25 vaga cohors (‘company’) = feminine. [Afterthought, three years on: given that vagus represents motion from A to B elsewhere in the poem, it now occurs to me that vagus animis definitely represents an inward motion in terms of gender identity. Difficult to convey. Something like ‘an egg at heart’ seems to represent the meaning accurately; but many cis readers over a certain age would be unfamiliar with that English expression.]