Sibylline Sentence Examples
These officials, at the command of the senate, consulted the Sibylline books in order to discover, not exact predictions of definite future events, but the religious observances necessary to avert extraordinary calamities (pestilence, earthquake) and to expiate prodigies in cases where the national deities were unable, or unwilling, to help. Only the interpretation of the oracle which was considered suitable to the emergency was made known to the public, not the oracle itself.
Klausen (Aeneas and die Penaten, 1839), the oldest collection of Sibylline oracles appears to have been made about the time of Solon and Cyrus at Gergis on Mount Ida in the Troad; it was attributed to the Hellespontine Sibyl and was preserved in the temple of Apollo at Gergis.
Some genuine Sibylline verses are preserved in the Book of Marvels (IIepi oav,sautwv) of Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century A.D.).
But when Greek deities were introduced into Rome on the advice of the Sibylline books (in 495 B.C., on the occasion of a severe drought), Demeter, the Greek goddess of seed and harvest, whose worship was already common in Sicily and Lower Italy, usurped the place of Ceres in Rome, or rather, to Ceres were added the religious rites which the Greeks paid to Demeter, and the mythological incidents which originated with her.
Sibylline Oracles (excluding Christian portions).
His worship was introduced into Rome by order of the Sibylline books (293 B.C.), to avert a pestilence.
Victorinus wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse of John; and all these theologians, especially Lactantius, were diligent students of the ancient Sibylline oracles of Jewish and Christian origin, and treated them as divine revelations.
Lucke's Journal(1819-18 20, 182 2), one on the origin and composition of the Sibylline Oracles "- Ober die Entstehung and Zusammensetzung der Sibyllinischen Orakel," and another on the authorship and design of the Book of Daniel, "Uber Verfasser and Zweck des Buches Daniel."
Accordingly recourse is had, tinder the direction of the Sibylline books, to new forms of appeal for the divine help, the general vowing of the ver sacrum and the elaborate Greek lectisternium after Trasimene in 217 B.C., and the human sacrifice in the forum after Cannae in the following year.
With this object he consecrated there his new temple of Apollo (28 B.C.), associated for long with the Julian house, and adopted by Augustus as his special patron at Actium, and transferred to its keeping the Sibylline books, thus marking the new headquarters of the Graeco-Roman religion.
AdvertisementRelying upon a Sibylline oracle that three Cornelii should be rulers of Rome, Lentulus regarded himself as the destined successor of Cornelius.
The Sibylline books, however, declared that the king must not be restored by force, of arms, at the risk of peril to Rome.
In many nations divination and priesthood have always gone hand in hand; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the XV viri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges.
The extant fragments and conglomerations of the Sibylline oracles, heathen, Jewish and Christian, were collected, examined, translated and explained by C. Alexandre in a monumental edition full of exemplary learning and acumen.
The well-known story of Tarquinius's repeated refusal and final consent to purchase the Sibylline books has its origin in the fact that the building of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, in which they were kept, was ascribed to him.
AdvertisementIn the fifth Sibylline book, which, with the exception of verses 1-51, was mainly composed by a Jewish writer at the close of the first century, the return of Nero plays a great part.
It is said that Suleiman was firmly persuaded that Constantinople would be conquered during his reign, in accordance with a Sibylline prophecy which said that the city would be subdued by a caliph bearing the name of a prophet, he himself being the first to fulfil this condition.
The story of the Sibylline books in Rome, on the other hand, shows the growth of the idea of authority.
Such celebrations must be distinguished from those which were ordered, like the earlier lectisternia, by the Sibylline books in special emergencies.
Some, however, assign an Etruscan origin to the ceremony, the Sibylline books themselves being looked upon as old Italian "black books."
AdvertisementSibylline Leaves appeared in 1817; the Biographia Literaria and a revised edition of The Friend soon followed.
Thus, certain public works were said to have been begun by the earlier and finished by the later king; both instituted games, acquired the Sibylline books, and reorganized the army.
His crowning sin (recorded by the poet alone) was the destruction of the Sibylline books - a sin worthy of one who had decked his wife in the spoils of Victory, the goddess who had for centuries presided over the deliberations of the senate.
We might note besides that it is quoted in the Book of Adam and Eve, the Apocalypse of Moses, the Apocalypse of Paul, the anonymous work De montibus Sina et Sion, the Sibylline Oracles ii.
By order of the Sibylline books, a temple was built to these three deities near the Circus Flaminius; the whole cultus was borrowed from the Greeks, down even to the terminology, and priestesses were brought from the Greek cities.
AdvertisementIn 218 B.C., by order of the Sibylline books, a lectisternium was prepared for Juventas and a public thanksgiving to Hercules, an association which shows the influence of the Greek Hebe, the wife of Heracles.
From the regal period to the end of the republic, haruspices were summoned from Etruria to deal with prodigies not mentioned in the pontifical and Sibylline books, and the Roman priests carried out their instructions as to the offering necessary to appease the anger of the deity concerned.
In the year 12 B.C. Augustus sought out and burned a great many spurious oracles and subjected the Sibylline books to a critical revision; they were then placed by him in the temple of Apollo Patrotis on the Palatine, where we hear of them still existing in A.D.
On the charge of majestas (high treason) incurred by having left his province for Egypt without the consent of the senate and in defiance of the Sibylline books, he was acquitted; it is said that the judges were bribed, and even Cicero, who had recently attacked Gabinius with the utmost virulence, was persuaded by Pompey to say as little as he could in his evidence to damage his former enemy.
In the crisis of the second Punic War (205 B.C.), when the Romans lost faith in the efficacy of their own religion to save the state, the Senate, in compliance with an oracle in the Sibylline books to the effect that the foreign foe could be driven from Italy if the Idaean Mother (Cybele) were brought from Pessinus to Rome, sent ambassadors to the town, who obtained the sacred stone which was the symbol of the goddess and brought it to Rome, where the worship of Cybele was established.
It is cited without acknowledgment in the Book of Adam and Eve, the Apocalypses of Moses and Paul, the Sibylline Oracles, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Epistle of Barnabas, and referred to by Origen and Irenaeus (see Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 1895, pp. xvii-xxiv).
Her festival at Rome, the Floralia, instituted 2 3 8 B.C. by order of the Sibylline books and at first held irregularly, became annual after 173.
Otherwise, reference was made for an interpretation to the pontifices in olden times,afterwards frequently to the Sibylline books,or the Etruscan haruspices, when the incident was not already provided for by a rule, as, for example, that it was unlucky for a person leaving his house to meet a raven, that the sudden death of a person from epilepsy at a public meeting was a sign to break up the assembly.