The Sibyl at Cumae

Men of Greece, the time has now come. The histories written outside our own books have satisfied you that Moses and the rest of the prophets were far older than anyone your nation has counted wise. So abandon the old delusion your ancestors handed down. Read the sacred histories of the prophets, and find out from them what the true religion is. They do not hand you clever speeches. They do not talk in the way that is calculated to sound plausible and persuasive — that is the trick of men who want to rob you of the truth. They use, quite simply, whatever words and expressions come to hand, and they announce to you whatever the Holy Spirit, who came down upon them, chose to teach through them to people who want to learn the true religion. [a]

So lay aside every kind of false shame, and the deep-rooted error of the human race with all its swagger and empty noise — though you imagine that by it you have every advantage — and give yourselves to what will actually do you good. You will be committing no offense against your fathers if you now want to go over to what is directly opposed to their error. They themselves, in all likelihood, are lamenting in Hades at this moment, and repenting far too late; and if it were possible for them to show you from there what has become of them since this life ended, you would know what dreadful evils they wanted to save you from. But in this present life you cannot learn it from them, and you cannot learn it from the men here who claim to teach that philosophy which is falsely so called. One thing, then, is left for you to do. Renounce your fathers’ error and read the prophecies of the sacred men. Do not demand faultless style from them — the substance of our religion lies in deeds, not in words — and learn from them what will give you life without end.

As for the men who disgrace the name of philosophy to no purpose, they stand convicted of knowing nothing at all, as they are forced, unwillingly, to admit themselves. They not only disagree with one another; each of them has stated his own opinions now one way, now another.

And if one of the definitions of philosophy current among them is “the discovery of the truth,” how do men who do not possess the true knowledge deserve the name of philosophy? Take Socrates, the wisest of your wise men — the man your own oracle bore witness to, as you yourselves tell it, saying, “Of all men Socrates is the wisest.” If he admits that he knows nothing, how did the men who came after him claim to know even the things of heaven? Socrates said that this was exactly why he was called wise: other men pretended to know what they did not know, while he did not shrink from admitting that he knew nothing. He said, “I seem to myself to be wisest in this one small respect: what I do not know, I do not suppose that I know.” [e]

Let no one imagine that Socrates was ironically pretending ignorance, as he often does in the dialogues. The last words of his defense, spoken as he was being led away to the prison, prove that he was confessing his ignorance seriously and truthfully: “But it is now time to go away — I to die, and you to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is hidden from everyone but God.” Socrates spoke that last sentence in the Areopagus and went off to the prison, leaving to God alone the knowledge of what is hidden from us. The men who came after him cannot take in even earthly things, and yet they claim to understand heavenly ones as though they had seen them. Aristotle, at any rate — as though he had inspected the heavens more accurately than Plato — declared that God is not in the fiery substance, as Plato said (that was Plato’s teaching), but in the fifth element, air. And while he demanded to be believed about such things on the strength of his fine language, he left this life overwhelmed by the shame and disgrace of not being able to work out even what the Euripus at Chalcis was.

So let no one of sound judgment prefer these men’s elegant language to his own salvation. Let him do what the old story tells: stop his ears with wax and run from the sweet injury these sirens would do him. The men I have named held out their polished language like bait and have tried to lure many away from the right religion, imitating the one who dared to teach the first human beings to worship many gods. Do not be persuaded by them, I beg you. Read the prophecies of the sacred men. And if laziness, or the old superstition you inherited, keeps you from reading the prophecies of the holy men — through whom you can be taught about the one and only God, which is the first point of the true religion — then at least believe the man who first taught you the worship of many gods and afterwards chose to sing a useful and necessary recantation. I mean Orpheus, whose words I quoted a little earlier. And believe the others who wrote the same things about one God. It was God’s providence at work on your behalf that these men, unwillingly, testified that what the prophets said about one God was true — so that, once the doctrine of many gods was rejected by everyone, you might be given your chance to know the truth.

You can easily learn part of the right religion from the ancient Sibyl as well. By some powerful inspiration she teaches you, through her oracles, things that look very much like the teaching of the prophets. They say she was of Babylonian stock, the daughter of Berosus, who wrote the Chaldean History; and that when she had crossed over — how, I do not know — into the region of Campania, she uttered her oracles there in a city called Cumae, six miles from Baiae, where the hot springs of Campania are. [k]

When we were in that city we were shown a certain place: an enormous hall cut out of a single stone, a vast piece of work and worth all the wonder it gets. The people there, who had it from their fathers as part of their country’s tradition, told us that this was where she used to publish her oracles. In the middle of the hall they showed us three basins cut out of the one stone. When these were filled with water, they said, she washed in them; then she put her robe back on and withdrew into the innermost chamber of the hall, which is still part of the same single stone; and sitting in the middle of that chamber on a high platform and throne, she would deliver her oracles.

The Sibyl has been mentioned as a prophetess by many other writers, and by Plato too in the Phaedrus. It seems to me that Plato counted prophets divinely inspired because he had read her prophecies. He saw that what she had predicted long ago had come to pass, and for that reason, in the dialogue with Meno, he expresses his wonder and admiration for prophets in these words: “The people we now call prophetic we ought rightly to name divine. And we would say above all that they are divine, and are lifted into prophetic ecstasy by the inspiration and possession of God, when they speak correctly about many important matters and yet know nothing of what they are saying.” He is plainly and obviously referring to the prophecies of the Sibyl. Poets, once their poems are written, can go back and correct and polish them, especially to make the verse more exact. The Sibyl could not. She was filled with prophecy while the inspiration lasted; the moment it stopped, so did all memory of what she had said. That is in fact why only some of the meters of the Sibyl’s verses were preserved, and not all.

For when we were in that city we learned from our guide, who showed us the places where she used to prophesy, that there is a bronze chest in which, they said, her remains were kept. And besides everything else they told us as they had heard it from their fathers, they said that the men who took her prophecies down at the time were unlettered, and often went badly astray from the exactness of the meters. That, they said, is why some of the verses do not scan: the prophetess remembered nothing of what she had said once the possession and the inspiration ceased, and the men writing it down were too uneducated to record the meters accurately. So it is clear that Plato had the Sibyl’s prophecies in view when he said what he said about prophets, for his words were, “when they speak correctly about many important matters and yet know nothing of what they are saying.”

But men of Greece, since the matters of the true religion do not lie in the metrical counts of poetry, nor in that culture you hold in such high esteem, from now on give less devotion to exactness of meter and of language. Attend without quarreling to the words of the Sibyl, and recognize how great a benefit she will do you by foretelling — as she does, clearly and openly — the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God, inseparable from him in power; he took on humanity, which had been made in the image and likeness of God, and gave back to us the knowledge of the religion of our earliest forefathers — the religion that the generations after them abandoned when the envious devil bewitched them with his advice, so that they turned to the worship of beings that were no gods at all. [n]

And if you still hesitate, and something holds you back from believing about the forming of man, then believe the ones you have thought it right to listen to up to now. Know that your own oracle, when someone asked it to sing a hymn of praise to Almighty God, said this in the middle of the hymn: “who formed the first of men, and called him Adam.” Many people we know of have preserved this hymn, to convict those who are unwilling to believe a truth that everyone testifies to.

So if you do not rate the false fancy about beings that are no gods above your own salvation, men of Greece, then believe — as I said — the most ancient and honored Sibyl, whose books are kept all over the world. By some powerful inspiration she both teaches us in her oracles about the so-called gods, who do not exist, and also clearly and plainly prophesies about the promised coming of our Savior Jesus Christ and about everything that he was to do. Knowing these things will be the preparation you must have before you study the prophecies of the sacred men.

And if anyone supposes that he has learned the teaching about God from the most ancient of those you call philosophers, let him listen to Ammon and to Hermes: to Ammon, who in his discourse about God calls him wholly hidden; and to Hermes, who says plainly and distinctly that it is difficult to grasp God, and that even the man who can grasp him cannot possibly declare him to anyone else. From every point of view, then, it must be plain that there is no other way to learn anything about God and the true religion than from the prophets, who teach us by God’s own inspiration.