Cumaean Sibyl
In Italy various prophetic sites provided the petitioner with numerous types of responses. The sibyl, a prophetess usually associated with Rome and Cumae, spoke from various localities and was known as early as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 480 B.C.E.). At first she was a lone female prophet, but later her name, Sibylla, was made plural (Sibylle), and she flourished in various parts of the world. Ancient authors speak of different numbers of sibyls. Marcus Terentius Varro's naming of ten sibyls has been generally adopted. The ten sibyls resided in Persia, Libya, Delphi, Cumae in Italy, Erythrae, Samos, Cumae in Aeolia, Marpessa, Ankara, and Tiburtis. Of all the sibyls the Cumaean Sibyl in Italy is the most famous and was immortalized in Virgil's Aeneid. To learn of his fate in Italy, Aeneas was advised by Helenus to seek out the sibyl at Cumae: "When you have sailed here and have arrived at the city of Cumae and the divine lakes and Avernus resounding with its forests, you will see the frenzied prophet who sings the fates from the depths of the cliff and commits her signs and symbols to leaves. Whatever songs the maiden has written down, she arranges them in order and leaves them set apart in the cave." (Aeneid 3:441–446).
Noted historians of the Roman republic reported that one of the sibyls offered nine volumes of her prophecies to Tarquin the Second, who refused the high price she asked. She then burned three of the books and asked the same price for the rest. Tarquin again refused but finally bought the last three, since the sibyl had burned all but these. The sibyl then disappeared, and her books were preserved and were called the Sibylline Verses. These prophetic books were reverenced by the Romans, and a college of priests was in charge of safeguarding them in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. When the Capitolium was burned in 83 B.C.E., the Sibylline Verses were destroyed. Verses were sought in Greece to replace those destroyed. Although eight books of Sibylline Verses remain, they were probably composed in the second century C.E. by Christians. The Renaissance humanist Guillaume Postel wrote a commentary on Virgil's fourth eclogue often referred to as the "Messianic Eclogue," in the preface to which he indicated that if the eclogue were read as "Sibylline Enthusiasm," which he equated to the most divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it would be worthy of the bishop of Clermont, to whom Postel dedicated the work. In his commentary he wrote that from the judgments of Janus, the sibyls, and the holy men of the Gentiles, among whom he included Job, prophecies developed in a continuous tradition. He argued that the final age of the Cumaean song, which all antiquity awaited, depended upon the instauration of a golden age that also had been proclaimed by the sacred vow of the sons of Shem under Christ.