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More "Sibylline" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be a splendid amusement for the populace. Still the opinion spread that the catastrophe would not have assumed such dreadful proportions but for the anger of the gods; for this reason "piacula," or purifying sacrifices, were commanded in the temples. By advice of the Sibylline books, the Senate ordained solemnities and public prayer to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina. Matrons made offerings to Juno; a whole procession of them went to the seashore to take water and sprinkle with ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of Scandinavia, creation, and the early history of Norway. The Scandinavian "Books of Genesis" are the "Voluspa Saga," or "prophecy of Vola" (about 230 verses), "Vafthrudner's Saga," and "Grimner's Saga." These three resemble the Sibylline books of ancient Rome, and give a description of chaos, the formation of the world, the creation of all animals (including dwarfs, giants and fairies), the general conflagration, and the renewal of the world, when, like the new Jerusalem, it will appear ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Romans neglected them because they had the Sibylline books, and their auspices (aruspices, or haruspices), which stood them instead of oracles. M. Vandale demonstrates that some remains of the oracles might yet be seen under the Christian emperors. It was then only in process of time that oracles were entirely abolished; and it may be boldly ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... what your friends do, where they are, how they fare, &c. The other species of this fury are enthusiasms, revelations, and visions, so often mentioned by Gregory and Bede in their works; obsession or possession of devils, sibylline prophets, and poetical furies; such as come by eating noxious herbs, tarantulas stinging, &c., which some reduce to this. The most known are these, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... consul to settle these matters, as he should deem consistent with the interest of the state and his own honour. The state was at this time suddenly occupied with a question of a religious nature, in consequence of the discovery of a prediction in the Sibylline books, which had been inspected on account of there having been so many showers of stones this year. It ran thus: "Whensoever a foreign enemy should bring war into the land of Italy, he may be driven out of Italy and conquered, if the Idaean Mother should ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain particular things or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... was adopted by the Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered by a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... proceeded to pour out another cup of tea, and having mixed and flavored it, she looked in a weird and sibylline manner across ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... prophesied the advent of Christ. There is a passage in one of Virgil's eclogues (the fourth) upon which the supposition is based. Early in the Christian era, when men were spreading the new faith, they made much of these sibylline prophecies to ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... history, contrived with the intention to keep up the national spirit, and diffuse hopes of the new enterprise of Vasco de Gama, who had just sailed on a voyage of discovery to the Indies. Three stones were discovered near Cintra, bearing in ancient characters a Latin inscription; a sibylline oracle addressed prophetically "To the Inhabitants of the West!" stating that when these three stones shall be found, the Ganges, the Indus, and the Tagus should exchange their commodities! This was the pious fraud of a Portuguese poet, sanctioned by the approbation of the king. When the stones ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... black or dark, checked skirts, with torn red woollen shawls hanging from their heads, glanced sidelong at Veronica, when they were still young; but the older ones went by without giving her a look, their leathern, Sibylline faces set, their old lids wrinkled by everlasting effort till they almost hid the small dark eyes. The most of them carried something in their hands,—faggots, covered baskets, small sacks of potatoes, or corn, or beans; and when the load ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Cicero's treatise on Divination a great deal of interesting matter may be found on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later date is that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, who acted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquin purchased from the old woman or Sibyl, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... reason, the rather insipid quatrain was tortured into a baleful prophecy. It was considered very ominous that the battery should be first opened against this Sibylline tower. The chimes, too, which had been playing, all through the siege, the music of Marot's sacred songs, happened that morning to be sounding forth from every belfry the twenty-second psalm: "My God, my God, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that ye have so much misgiving about opening the Sibylline books, as if ye were deliberating in an assembly of Christians, and not in the temple of all the gods. Let inquiry be made of the sacred books, and let celebration take place of the ceremonies that ought to be fulfilled. Far from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... performed it well; but he was dissuaded from his purpose by his Friends, as beneath the dignity of a Professor of the occult Sciences. Yet these very Friends, I suppose, would have thought it had added lustre to his high Station, to have new-furbished out some dull northern Chronicle, or dark Sibylline AEnigma. But let it not be thought that what is here said insinuates any thing to the discredit of Greek and Latin criticism. If the follies of particular Men were sufficient to bring any branch of Learning into disrepute, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... attempted to meet the wishes of the greater part of mankind, who have in all lands and in all ages longed for some outward revelation from God, and testified their desire by running after all sorts of omens, auguries, and oracles, consulting witches, and treasuring Sibylline leaves, employing writing mediums, and listening to spirit-rappers. The "inspiration which is limited to no sect, age, or nation—which is wide as the world, and common as God,"[48] has never produced ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... themselves so, Heaven at the very beginning of the next year by striking with a thunderbolt the statue of Jupiter erected on the Alban hill, delayed the return of Ptolemy some little time. For when they had recourse to the Sibylline verses they found written in them this very passage: "If the king of Egypt come requesting some aid, refuse him not friendship altogether, nor yet succor him with any great force: otherwise, you will have both toils and dangers." Thereupon, ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... that these sibylline leaves of Mohammedanism make up a heterogeneous jumble of varied elements. Some of the chapters are long, others are short; now the prophet seems to be caught up by a whirlwind, and is brought face to face with ineffable mysteries, of which he speaks ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... half a minute. The women, in ragged black or dark, checked skirts, with torn red woollen shawls hanging from their heads, glanced sidelong at Veronica, when they were still young; but the older ones went by without giving her a look, their leathern, Sibylline faces set, their old lids wrinkled by everlasting effort till they almost hid the small dark eyes. The most of them carried something in their hands,—faggots, covered baskets, small sacks of potatoes, or corn, or beans; ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... like an angel on the ground, as well as in the air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael Angelo's, that a Sybil cannot look Sibylline unless ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... little volume without perceiving how choice a spirit the authoress must have been, and understanding how it came to pass that she was especially honoured by the close and warm attachment of Mrs. Browning. I have scores of letters signed "Isa," or rather Sibylline leaves scrawled in the vilest handwriting on all sorts of abnormal fragments of paper, and despatched in headlong haste, generally concerning some little projected festivity at Bellosguardo, and advising me of the expected presence of some stranger ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... intention to keep up the national spirit, and diffuse hopes of the new enterprise of Vasco de Gama, who had just sailed on a voyage of discovery to the Indies. Three stones were discovered near Cintra, bearing in ancient characters a Latin inscription; a sibylline oracle addressed prophetically "To the Inhabitants of the West!" stating that when these three stones shall be found, the Ganges, the Indus, and the Tagus should exchange their commodities! This was the pious fraud of a Portuguese poet, sanctioned by the approbation ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon their intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm —expectant, consecrated, and holy—which the early painters have caught the shadow of in their pictures of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Christianity among the Gentiles, that Orpheus, like the Sibyls and some other of the characters of mythology, had had some blind revelation of the coming of a saviour of the world, and had uttered indistinct prophecies of the event. Forgeries, similar to those of the Sibylline Verses, professing to be the remains of the poems of Orpheus, were made among the Alexandrian Christians, and for a long period his name was held in popular esteem, as that of a heathen prophet of Christian truth. Whether the paintings in the catacombs took their origin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... precursor &c 64. [predict by mathematical or statistical means from past experience] extrapolate, project. Adj. predicting &c v.; predictive, prophetic; fatidic^, fatidical^; vaticinal, oracular, fatiloquent^, haruspical, Sibylline; weatherwise^. ominous, portentous, augurous^, augurial, augural; auspicial^, auspicious; prescious^, monitory, extispicious^, premonitory, significant of, pregnant with, bit with the fate of. Phr. coming events ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... circumstances. Now you say you're glad and willing to marry me any day in the week, and so I'll choose Friday of my own accord. I'll marry you to-morrow, Pitt: and"—here she darted a roguishly sibylline glance at the clouds—"I have a water-proof; have you ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... uttered these words, Peregrine drew himself up to his full height, and his flashing eyes and animated gestures gave to what he said something of the weight of a sibylline prophecy. Then, calling his dog to heel, ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible. Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading immediately ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the empress walked up and down her room, undecided whether to turn the sibylline leaves or not. It might be sinful to question, it might be fatal to remain ignorant. Was it, or was it not the will of God, that she should pry into the great mystery of futurity? Surely it could not be sinful, else why ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... name was Serafina, opened the bedroom door and thrust out her head, covered with a dark and threadbare shawl. There was a sibylline gloom about her withered face, as though she had lived a lifetime in the face ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... Coleridge stood looking over my shoulder and while I worked he touched the sea, and it flushed a ruby red brighter than laudanum; and then he leaned down, and with a pencil wrote Dele across the fragment in his Sibylline Leaves.' To-day I tried the effect of the hint, but the amber water mellows the woman's features, and the ruby light rendered them ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... almost independent, and waged open war on the Parthian satraps. A large section of the people cherished a somewhat simple theodicy. How could God allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosen people to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles and the Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiah and Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph of good. Evil had reached its acme in Nero, and the time had come when God would ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... art of Greece that made itself felt through Etruria, came also the influence of the Grecian mythology, and Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva found a shrine on the top of the Capitoline, where the first statue of a deity was erected. The mysterious Sibylline Books are also a mark of the Grecian influence, coming from Cum, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious maze traced upon its pavement; its maze-like crypt, centering in the shrine of the sibylline Notre-Dame, itself a natural or very primitive grotto or cave. A few years were still to pass ere sacrilegious hands despoiled it on a religious pretext:—the catholic church must pay, even with the molten gold ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... regard the Serapeum as the very heart of the universe—the centre and fulcrum on which the balance of the earth depended; to her, Serapis himself was inseparable from his temple and its atmosphere of magical and mystical power. Every prophecy, every Sibylline text, every oracle must be false if the overthrow of that image could remain unpunished—if the destruction of the universe failed to follow, as surely as a, flood ensues from a breach in a dyke. How indeed could it be otherwise, according to the explanation which her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... will pardon my interrupting you, I can throw your observations together—make your Sibylline leaves into a book. Your lordship will find the matter, and I will not ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the mystic side of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your "sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way of seeing ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... punishment was to be a splendid amusement for the populace. Still the opinion spread that the catastrophe would not have assumed such dreadful proportions but for the anger of the gods; for this reason "piacula," or purifying sacrifices, were commanded in the temples. By advice of the Sibylline books, the Senate ordained solemnities and public prayer to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina. Matrons made offerings to Juno; a whole procession of them went to the seashore to take water and sprinkle with it the statue ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... and gentle sensibility. This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself—and incidentally Bowles—in three sonnets ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... performing in it; a statue of Virtus, standing before some of the gates, fell upon its face; and certain persons rendered inspired by the Mother of the Gods declared that the goddess was angry with them. On this point the Sibylline books were consulted. They made the same statements and prescribed that the statue be taken down to the sea and purified with water from it. In obedience to the order the goddess went very far indeed out into the surges, where ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... superstitions of other peoples than to acquire much useful knowledge. They were cosmopolitan in medical art as in religion. They had acquaintance with the domestic medicine known to all savages, a little rude surgery, and prescriptions from the Sibylline books, and had much recourse to magic. It was to Greece that the Romans first owed their knowledge of healing, and of art and science generally, but at no time did the Romans equal the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... they have entered into more frequent combinations with state functions and state movements in our modern ages than in the classical age of Paganism. Look at prophecies, for example: the Romans had a few obscure oracles afloat, and they had the Sibylline books under the state seal. These books, in fact, had been kept so long, that, like port wine superannuated, they had lost their flavor and body. [Footnote: 'Like port wine superannuated, the Sibylline books ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the Sibylline books? How often they were offered, and the terms? It is not too late, Messer Blondel—even now. While there is life there is hope, there is more than ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... facts, that point to a history all unwritten save in some few brief sentences in pits and excavations, of oil operations along the Oil Valley. These detached fragments, like the remains of the Sibylline Oracles, but cause us to regret more earnestly the loss of the volumes which contained the whole. A grand and wonderful history has been that of this American continent, but it has never been graven in the archives of time. The actors in its bygone scenes ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... bravely defended her lover, but without effect. A few days later she again met her old gipsy crone Hagar Burton, who repeated her sibylline declaration. As Miss Arundell never, by any chance, talked about anything or anybody except Burton, and as she paid liberally for consulting the Fates, this declaration necessarily points to peculiar acumen on the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... that time imperfect; unpublished fragments of Plautus, of Isaeus, of Themistius; an unpublished work of the philosopher Porphyrius; some writings of the Jew Philo; the ancient interpreters of Virgil; two books of the Chronicles of Eusebius Pamphilus; the VI. and XIV. Sibylline Books; and the six books of the Republic of Cicero. I saw, too, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, fragments of the version of the Bible made in the middle of the fourth century, by Ulfila, bishop of the Maesogoths. The labours of the bishop underwent a strange dispersion. The gospels are at Upsala; ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... collection, and one in the library of the British Museum. Finally, should any good people be concerned to hear that Pagan fictions will so long retain their influence over literature, let them reflect that, as the Bishop of St David's says, in his "Proofs of the Inspiration of the Sibylline Verses," read at the last meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, "at all events, a Pagan ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... woman was regarded as divine or as capable of ministering to divinity. The prophetic powers of woman were universally recognized. The oracles at Delphi, Argos, Epirus, Thrace and Arcadia were feminine. Indeed the Sibylline prophetesses were known ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... Other barbarian invaders—Genseric, a Vandal, 455; Ricimer, a Sueve, 472; Vitiges, a Dalmatian, 537; Arnulph, a Lombard, 756—may come under the head of "Goth." "The Christian," "from motives of fanaticism"—Theodosius, for instance, in 426; and Stilicho, who burned the Sibylline books—despoiled, mutilated, and pulled down temples. Subsequently, popes, too numerous to mention, laid violent hands on the temples for purposes of repair, construction, and ornamentation of Christian churches. More than once ancient structures were converted into cannon-balls. There were, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... streamed toward me again through the leafy aisles, and I remembered my high aspirings, my poems, my ideals: the floating vision of a Dark Ladye passed or looked up at me through the broken waves of Oblivion; she listened to my rhapsodies with the old puzzling silence; she confided to me certain Sibylline leaves out of her diary; then she receded, cold and unresponsive, a statue cut out of a shadow. I was obliged to untie my cravat. Finally, I fell asleep and dreamed of Mary Ashburton crowned with the neat workwoman's cap of Francine Joliet. I returned to dinner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
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