In time, any prophetic priestess of Apollo became known as a Sibyl. Sibyls were believed to live 900 to 1,000 years. Some could interpret dreams; others could make their voices heard after death. Their predictions were taken down in writing by priests, often in the form of Greek hexameter verse. By the fourth century BCE there may have been as many as 12 Sibyls around the Greco-Roman world. The earliest is thought to have been the Sibyl who lived in a cave on Mount Cuma, near Cumae, a Greek colony in
Southern Italy. The most famous was Apollo’s
Priestess at Delphi (a Greek city-state in Phocis on the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus); she was better known as the Pythia, and was called Herophile. Further Sibyls were found at Erythrae, on a gulf near Chios, due west of Izmir on the coast of modern Turkey; at Samos, the most easterly of the Greek Sporades islands; at Sardis in Turkey about 6 miles (10 km) from the coast of the Aegean Sea at the base of Mount Tmolus; and at Tibur (modern Tivoli, northeast of Rome, Italy). The Trojan or Hellespontine Sibyl was based near the ancient city ofTroy on the shores of the Hellespont (now known as the Dardanelles), the strait connecting the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea. Four other Sibyls, including the Persian Sibyl (see box, page 283),
Practiced in Babylon (part of modern Iraq), Egypt, Libya, and Phrygia (part of Anatolia, a region of modern Turkey). Their exact locations are uncertain. Even less is known of the Cimmerian Sibyl. The Cimmerians were an ancient people who were driven out of the Crimea in the Black Sea region by Scythians in the eighth century BCE. They migrated to Anatolia, destroying the kingdom of Phrygia, and invading Lydia in the seventh century BCE. The Cimmerian Sibyl is thought to have been established on the Bosporus coast, near modern Istanbul, although she may have moved with her people.
World History
