This photograph was taken by the affluent British photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Known for portraits of celebrity friends like Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir John Herschel, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Ellen Terry, G. F. Watts, Henry Taylor and Robert Browning, it was also not uncommon for Julia Margaret Cameron to photograph staged thematic scenes from history, folklore, and mythology. This photograph, titled “A Sibyl,” is one such themed piece pulled from the stories of ancient Greece and Rome.
A Sibyl, also spelled Sibylle and Sibyll, is a curious type of prophetess figure born from a fusion of the divine messenger, fortune teller, and revelatory writer archetypes. Sibyls were sought for their insight on the present and the future, and they could provide guidance on matters of the gods and death. They were described similarly to the Greek Pythia priestess who operated at Delphi, displaying erratic and exaggerated behavior, and known for delivering cryptic messages from the divine beyond. Not just verbal in nature, the sayings of the Sibyls were also written down and preserved. Featured heavily in the folkloric early history of Rome, the Sibyls were a group of prophetic women whose numbers varied between 1 and 12, and they made appearances in Roman origin myths, such as the story of the Trojan refugee, Aeneas (allegedly an ancestor of Rome’s founders), who traveled with the Cumaean Sibyl into the underworld.
Myth and legend aside, a living Sibyl was also said to have been active during the Roman kingdom era, and a collection of sayings and prophecies attributed to the Sibyls was reported to have been purchased by the Roman government in the time of Rome’s last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (r. 534-509 BCE). Rome’s compiled collection of cryptic and poetic riddles was called the Sibylline Books, and the text, which was treated with great respect, was placed under guard in Rome’s main temple of Jupiter.
Prophecies and riddles from the Sibylline Books were often studied by the Romans in times of great crisis. Wars, political turmoil, times of plague, and other similar devastating events, could provoke the Roman government to pull out the Books in order to search for advice and direction. Curiously, little is known about what was actually written in the Sibylline Books, as the prophecies were rarely quoted by ancient authors. Nevertheless, whatever the pages contained, they remained safe in their guarded temple until they were evidently heavily damaged by fire in 83 BCE, during the time of the dictator, Sulla. Despite the damaged state of the Sibylline Books, Romans continued to consult the remnants for centuries more, until whatever remained was completely destroyed by General Flavius Stilicho around 407 CE.
It is this ancient subject of the Sibyls and their books of prophecies that Julia Margaret Cameron captured in her Victorian-era photograph. A classically-garbed woman can be seen sitting beside an angled table, her arm draped over the pages of an open voluminous book. Just as in history, the writing in the book is obscure and hidden from the eye, giving us no clue as to what is printed on the pages.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Sources:
- The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
- The History of Rome by Livy, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Margaret-Cameron
- https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/julia-margaret-cameron-1815-1879
- https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/271512
