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The ruins visible today are those of a building of the 5th century BC, reconstructed under the Roman Emperor Augustus and in the 6th century AD converted into a Christian church. Lower down the hill is the base and outline of the Temple of Apollo, of uncertain origins. Lower yet is the cave of the world’s most famous oracle, the Cumaean Sibyl.
The wise woman who can foretell the future appears in the traditions of many lands, none more celebrated in antiquity than the Sibyl of Cumae. At an early date, people in Asia knew verses believed to be the oracular utterances of prophetesses known as Sibyllai. What the word sibyl means is unknown, though legend says it was the name of a seeress at Marpessus, near Troy, who spoke in oracles in riddles and wrote them down on leaves.
On the acropolis at Cumae was a cave known by tradition as that of the sibyl. When excavated in the 1920’s, it turned out to be bigger than expected, a huge gallery with light shafts and water cisterns leading off it. A second cave was discovered nearby, which archeologist were satisfied was the sibyl’s. The main gallery ends in a vestibule with a pair of built-in stone benches and beyond it a vaulted chamber. People may once have sat on seats while waiting to consult the sibyl. They were, perhaps in a state of heightened anticipation for, in daytime, the alternate bands of light and dark created by the shafts along the gallery meant that anyone coming from the inner end to conduct newcomers to the sanctum would seem to appear and disappear. Special effects are created by these light shafts which served to awe visitors with their aperture effects in the oracular chambers.
It is easy, standing at the entrance to this cavern, to imagine Virgil’s hero Aeneas and his Trojans, seasoned warriors all, yet chill with dread, as the sibyl from her shrine sang out her riddles, echoing in the cave. The Temple complex of Tarxien found beneath a field in Malta is one of the largest ancient monuments in Europe. Who built it, when and why? How is it linked to other sacred sites in Malta? Is it part of a megalithic culture found elsewhere in Europe?
In the later classical world, oracles were associated with the dead, as at Cumae in Italy. Anyone hearing the echoing voice from the oracle room, issuing from the small oval niche in one of the walls, could easily believe that the oracle was a medium through which the dead ancestor spoke. A statuette of a so-called ’sleeping lady’ was found at the Hypogeum in a votive pit into which thank offerings were thrown, either after a consultation with the oracle or following the cure of an illness. The sleeping lady shows, according to some authorities, the practice of ‘incubation‘: the act of sleeping in a shrine in the expectation of prophetic dreams or of dreams affecting a cure. |
