Roman Mosaics; Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood

by Hugh Macmillan

The first glimpse of Cumæ, though very impressive to the imagination, is not equally so to the eye. Crossing some cultivated fields, a bold eminence of trachytic tufa, covered with scanty grass and tufts of brushwood, rises between you and the sea, forming part of a range of low hills, which evidently mark the ancient coast-line. On this elevated plateau, commanding a most splendid view of the blue, sunlit Mediterranean as far as Gaeta and the Ponza Islands, stood the almost mythical city; and crowning its highest point, where a rocky escarpment, broken down on every side except on the south, by which it can be ascended, the massive foundations of the walls of the Acropolis may still be traced throughout their whole extent. Very few relics of the original Greek colony survive; and these have to be sought chiefly underneath the remains of Roman-Gothic and medieval dynasties, which successively occupied the place, and partially obliterated each other, like the different layers of writing in a palimpsest. Time and the passions of man have dealt more ruthlessly with this than with almost any other of the renowned spots of Italy. Some fragments of the ancient fortifications, a confused and scattered heap of ruins within the line of the city walls, and a portion of a fluted column, and a single Doric capital of the grand old style, supposed to belong to the temple of Apollo, on the summit of the Acropolis, are all that meet the eye to remind us of this home of ancient faith and prophecy. In the plain at the foot of the rock is the Necropolis of Cumæ, the most ancient burial-place in Italy, from whose rifled Greek graves a most valuable collection of archaic vases and personal ornaments were obtained and transferred to the museums of Naples, Paris, and St. Petersburg; but the tombs themselves have now been destroyed, and only a few marble fragments of Roman sepulchral decoration scattered around indicate the spot. And not far off, partially concealed by earth and underwood, may be seen the ruins of the amphitheatre, with its twenty-one tiers of seats leading down to the arena.

You look in vain for any trace of the sanctuary of the most celebrated of the Sibyls. Her tomb is pointed out as a vague ruin a short distance from the Necropolis, among the tombs which line the Via Domitiana; and Justin Martyr and Pausanias both describe a round cinerary urn found in this spot which was said to have contained her ashes. The tufa rock of the Acropolis is pierced with numerous dark caverns and labyrinthine passages, the work of prehistoric inhabitants, which have only been partially explored on account of the difficulty and danger, and any one of which might have been the abode of the prophetess. A larger excavation in the side of the hill facing the sea, with a flight of steps leading up from it into another smaller recess, and numerous lateral openings and subterranean passages, supposed to penetrate into the very heart of the mountain, and even to communicate with Lake Fusaro, is pointed out by the local guides as the Sibyl's Cave, which, as Virgil tells us, had a hundred entrances and issues, from whence as many resounding voices echoed forth the oracles of the inspired priestess. But we are confused in our efforts at identification; for another cavern bore this name in former ages, which was destroyed by the explosion of the combustible materials with which Narses filled it in undermining the citadel. This, we have reason to believe, was the cave which Justin Martyr visited more than seventeen hundred years ago, and of which he has left behind a most interesting account. "We saw," he says, "when we were in Cumæ, a place where a sanctuary is hollowed in the rock—a thing really wonderful and worthy of all admiration. Here the Sibyl delivered her oracles, we were told by those who had received them from their ancestors, and who kept them even as their patrimony. Also, in the middle of the sanctuary, they showed us three receptacles cut in the same rock, and in which, they being filled with water, she bathed, as they said, and when she resumed her garments, she retired into the inner part of the sanctuary, likewise cut in the same rock, and there being seated on a high place in the centre, she prophesied." But after all you do not care to fasten your attention upon any particular spot, for you feel that the whole place is overshadowed by the presence of this mysterious being; and rock, and hill, and bush are invested with an air of solemn majesty, and with the memory of an ancient sanctity.

Nature has taken back the ruins of Cumæ so completely to her own bosom, that it is difficult to believe that on this desolate spot once stood one of the most powerful cities of antiquity, which colonised a large part of Southern Italy. A sad, lonely, fateful place it is, haunted for ever by the gods of old, the dreams of men. A silence, almost painful in its intensity, broods over its deserted fields; hardly a living thing disturbs the solitude; and the traces of man's occupancy are few and faint. The air seems heavy with the breath of the malaria; and no one would care to run the risk of fever by lingering on the spot to watch the sunset gilding the gloom of the Acropolis with a halo of kindred radiance. Every breeze that stirs the tall grasses and the leaves of the brushwood of the dismantled citadel has a wail in it; the long-drawn murmur of the peaceful sea at the foot of the hill comes up with a melancholy cadence to the ear; and even on the beautiful cyclamens and veronicas that strive to enliven the ruins of the temples of Apollo and Serapis, emblems of the immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are, has fallen the gray shadow of the past. Each pathetic bit of ruin has about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any historical associations. "Time here seems to have folded its wings." In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one day. Through all the dim ages no feature of its rugged face has changed; and all the potent spell of summer noons can only win from it a languid smile of faintest verdure. The sight of the scanty walls and scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless ages that have left no other memorials of their activity. What is fact and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away borderland where they seem to blend. And I do not envy the man who is not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe with which the mysterious divinity of Cumæ was worshipped by generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves—whose very graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages before our history had begun.

Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the Sibyl. It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid by some in Cumæ—where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of his life in exile—and by others in Rome. But the majority of writers associate it with the building of the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Several prodigies, significant of the future fate of Rome and of the reigning dynasty, occurred when the foundations of this temple were dug and the walls of it built. A fresh human head, dripping gore, was found deep down beneath the earth, which implied that this spot was destined to become the head of the whole world; and hence the old name of the "Saturnine Hill" was changed to the "Capitoline." All the gods who had been worshipped from time immemorial on this hill, when consulted by auguries, gave permission for the removal of their shrines and altars in order that room might be provided for the gigantic temple of the great Ruler of the gods, save Terminus and Youth, who refused to abandon the sacred spot, and whose obstinacy was therefore regarded as a sign that the boundaries of the city should never be removed, and that her youth would be perpetually renewed. But a still more wonderful sign of the future of Rome was given on this occasion. A mysterious woman, endowed with preternatural longevity—believed to be no other than Deiphobe, the Cumæan Sibyl herself, the daughter of Circe and Gnostus, who had been the guide of Æneas into the world of the dead—appeared before Tarquin and offered him for a certain price nine books, which contained her prophecies in mystic rhyme. Tarquin, ignorant of the value of the books, refused to buy them. The Sibyl departed, and burned three of them. Coming back immediately, she offered the remaining six at the same price that she had asked for the nine. Tarquin again refused; whereupon the Sibyl burned three more volumes, and returning the third time, made the same demand for the reduced remnant. Struck with the singularity of the proceeding, the king consulted the augurs; and learning from them the inestimable preciousness of the books, he bought them, and the Sibyl forthwith vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared. This legend reads like a moral apothegm on the increasing value of life as it passes away.

Whatever credence we may attach to this account of their origin—or rather, whatever sediment of historical truth may have been precipitated in the fable—there can be no doubt that the so-called Sibylline books of Rome did actually exist, and that for a very long period they were held in the highest veneration. They were concealed in a stone chest, buried under the ground, in the temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol. Two officers of the highest rank were appointed to guard them, whose punishment, if found unfaithful to their trust, was to be sewed up alive in a sack and thrown into the sea. The number of guardians was afterwards increased, at first to ten and then to fifteen, whose priesthood was for life, and who in consequence were exempted from the obligation of serving in the army and from other public offices in the city. Being regarded as the priests of Apollo, they had each in front of his house a brazen tripod, similar to that on which the priestess of Delphi sat.

The contents of the Sibylline books, being supposed to contain the fate of the Roman Empire, were kept a profound secret, and only on occasions of public danger or calamity, and by special order of the senate, were they allowed to be consulted. When the Capitol was burned in the Marsic war, eighty-two years before Christ, they perished in the flames: but so seriously was the loss regarded that ambassadors were sent to Greece, Asia Minor, and Cumæ, wherever Sibylline inspiration was supposed to exist, to collect the prophetic oracles, and thus make up as far as possible for what had been lost. In Cumæ nothing was discovered; but at Erythræa and Samos a large number of mystic verses, said to have been composed by the Sibyl, were found. Some of them were collected into a volume, after having been purged from all spurious or suspected elements; and the volume was brought to Rome, and deposited in two gilt cases at the base of the statue of Apollo, in the temple of that god on the Palatine.

More than two thousand prophetic books, pretending to be Sibylline oracles, were found by Augustus in the possession of private persons; and these were condemned to be burned, and in future no private person was allowed to keep any writings of the kind. But in spite of every attempt to authenticate the books that were publicly accepted, the new collection was never regarded with the same veneration as the original volumes of Tarquin which it replaced. A certain suspicion of spuriousness continued to cling to it, and greatly diminished its authority. It was seldom consulted. The Roman emperors after Tiberius—who still further sifted it—utterly neglected the received collection; and not till shortly before the fatal battle of the Milvian Bridge, which overthrew paganism, was it again brought out, by Maxentius, for the purpose of indicating the fate of the enterprise. Julian the Apostate, in his attempt to galvanise the dead pagan religion into the semblance of life, sought to revive an interest in the Sibylline oracles, which were so closely identified with the political and religious fortunes of Rome. But his effort was vain: they fell into greater oblivion than before; and at last they were publicly burned by Stilicho, the father-in-law of the Emperor Honorius—called the Defender of Italy—whose own execution as a traitor at Ravenna shortly afterwards was considered by the pagan zealots as the just vengeance of the gods on his dreadful sacrilege.

Unlike the Jewish and Indian faiths, the Greek and Roman religions had no authoritative writings, and were not embodied in a system of elaborate dogmas. The Sibylline oracles may therefore be said to have formed their sacred scriptures, and to have served the purpose of a common religious creed in securing national unity. The original books of the Cumæan Sibyl were written in Greek, which was the language of the whole of the south of Italy at that time. The oracles were inscribed upon palm leaves; to which circumstance Virgil alludes in his description of the sayings of the Cumæan Sibyl being written upon the leaves of the forest. They were in the form of acrostic verses; the letters of the first verse of each oracle containing in regular sequence the initial letters of all the subsequent verses. They were full of enigmas and mysterious analogies, founded upon the numerical value of the initial letters of certain names. It is supposed that they contained not so much predictions of future events, as directions regarding the means by which the wrath of the gods, as revealed by prodigies and calamities, might be appeased. They seemed to have been consulted in the same way as Eastern nations consult the Koran and Hafiz. There was no attempt made to find a passage suitable to the occasion, but one of the palm leaves after being shuffled was selected at random. To this custom of drawing fateful leaves from the Sibylline books—called in consequence sortes sibyllinæ—there is frequent allusion by classic authors. We know that the writings of Homer and Virgil were thus treated. The elevation of Septimius Severus to the throne of the Roman Empire was supposed to have been foretold by the circumstance that he opened by chance the writings of Lampridius at the verse, "Remember, Roman, with imperial sway to rule the people." The Bible itself was used by the early Christians for such purposes of divination. St. Augustine, though he condemned the practice as an abuse of the Divine Word, yet preferred that men should have recourse to the Gospels rather than to heathen works. Heraclius is reported by Cedrenus to have asked counsel of the New Testament, and to have been thereby persuaded to winter in Albania. Nicephorus Gregoras frequently opened his Psalter at random in order that there he might find support in the trial under which he laboured. And even in these enlightened days, it is by no means rare to find superstitious men and women using the sacred Scriptures as the old Greeks and Romans used the Sibylline oracles—dipping into them by chance for indications of the Divine Will.

The Cumæan Sibyl was not the only prophetess of the kind. There were no less than ten females, endowed with the gift of prevision, and held in high repute, to whom the name of Sibyl was given. We read of the Persian Sibyl, the Libyan, the Delphic, the Erythræan, the Hellespontine, the Phrygian, and the Tiburtine. With the name of the last-mentioned Sibyl tourists make acquaintance at Tivoli. Two ancient temples in tolerable preservation are still standing on the very edge of the deep rocky ravine through which the Anio pours its foaming flood. The one is a small circular building, with ten pillars surrounding the broken-down cella, whose familiar appearance is often represented in plaster models and bronze and marble ornamental articles, taken home as souvenirs by travellers; and the other stands close by, and has been transformed into the present church of St. Giorgio. This latter temple is supposed, from a bas-relief found in it, representing the Sibyl sitting in the act of delivering an oracle, to be the ancient shrine of the Sibyl Albunea mentioned by Horace, Tibullus, and Lactantius. The earliest bronze statues at Rome were those of the three Sibyls, placed near the Rostra, in the middle of the Forum. No specimens of the literature of Rome precede the Sibylline books, except the rude hymn known as the Litany of the Arval Brothers, dating from the time of Romulus himself, which is simply an address to Mars, the Lares, and the Semones, praying for fair weather and for protection to the flocks. And it is thus most interesting to notice that the two compositions which lay at the foundation of all the splendid Latin literature of later ages were of an eminently religious character.

One of the most remarkable things connected with the pagan Sibyls were the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave rise. When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic literature. This literature emanated from different nationalities and different schools of thought. It combined classical story and Scripture tradition. Most of it was the product of pre-Christian Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great national excitement. The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future. The books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use; and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as genuine did not hesitate to say that the writers of the Bible had plagiarised parts of their prophecies from the oracles of the Sibyls.