ABSTRACT
The frantic portrait of Sibyls in Greek texts was appropriated most famously by Virgil in Book 6 of the Aeneid where: “In these words the Cumaean Sibyl chants from the shrine her dread enigmas and booms from the cavern, wrapping truth in darkness-so does Apollo shake the reigns as she rages, and ply the goad beneath her breast.” Her lips are described as “raving” and her behavior “frenzied.”3 The Latin word used to describe the Sibyl’s cave is horrendas which can be translated as fearful, terrible, horrible, or dreadful. The Latin words used to describe the Sibyl and her actions during her prophesying include: furenti-to rage, be mad, behave furiously; and rabida-mad, raging, frenzied, wild. In 1558 Thomas Phayer translated the following passage, adding much greater and more disturbing detail than can be found in Virgil’s Latin text:
All sodenly, with faces more than one, before the gates, And colours more than one, [ . . . ] wild she stood in traunce, Her hear [hair] upsterting stands, her trebling brest doth panting
praunse. Her hart outraging swelles, nor mortallike she lokes at last: Above mankind she speakes, whan of the god she felt the blast, In sprite [spirit] approaching nere. [ . . . ] But wrastling wild as yet, against the god in thentry [sic] large Dame Sybly mombling made, & strugling strong wrode the charge If haply so she might the gods enforcing shake from brest [ . . . ].4
