Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

The sibyls, according to one authority, were in antiquity “women who in a state of ecstasy proclaimed
coming events, generally unpleasant, spontaneously and without being asked or being connected with any
particular oracle site.”^9 Over the formative years of Christian religion, the tradition of the sibyls was
assimilated to that of biblical prophecy. The sybilline prophecies—originally collected in a book
supposedly sold in the sixth century bce by the Cumaean sibyl, who lived in a cave near Naples, to
Tarquin, the last of the legendary kings of Rome—came to be read increasingly as foretelling not natural
disasters or the like but the coming of Christ and the Last Judgment. (Hence the reference to the sibyl in
the Dies Irae sequence, known to us since chapter 3.)