The Sibyl · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But upon Europe the greatest wound shall spring up like grain.
This one shall ravage the city of Babylon with plague,
and all the land the sun looks down upon,
in the East, and he alone shall sail across the world.
Woe to you, Babylon — you shall serve in triumphal processions,
you once called mistress; Ares comes down upon Asia,
he comes in truth, and shall slaughter many of your children.
And then you shall send forth your kingly man,
named for the number four, the spear-wielder,
the terrible archer, with mighty warriors.
And then between the Cilicians and the Assyrians
famine and war shall hold sway; and great-hearted kings
shall stir up the dread strife of soul-devouring discord.
But you, flee across, leave the king behind,
do not wish to remain, nor be ashamed to prove a coward;
for a terrible lion shall rush upon you, a raw-flesh-eating beast,
savage, a foreign judge, a cloak wrapped about his shoulders.
Flee the thunderbolt man. An evil yoke shall come upon Asia,
and again all the earth shall drink blood like rain.
But when the great, wealth-giving city of Egypt
the Pellaean Ares shall establish, and name it for himself,
his fate and death betrayed treacherously by his companions —
for having left the Indians and come to Babylon,
a barbarous murder shall destroy him at the banquet tables.
Afterward others shall rule, each over his own tribe,
people-devouring kings, arrogant and faithless,
in a few short years; but the great-hearted, lordly one,
who shall strip Europe bare before the eyes of all,
from the time when all the earth shall drink the blood of every race,
shall depart, having spent his own life's very form.
And there shall be other kings, eight men in all,
of his line, all bearing the very same name.
And Egypt shall then be a bride holding sovereign sway,
and the great city of the Macedonian lord,
queenly Alexandria, glorious nurse of cities,
shining in beauty, shall alone be the mother-city.
And then let Memphis reproach those who hold the rule.
And deep peace shall come upon the whole world;
and the black-clodded earth shall then bear more abundant fruit.
And then evil shall come upon the Jews, nor shall they escape
famine and plague on that unbearable day;
but the black-clodded, fair-eared, newly-ordered
immortal earth shall receive the many who perish.
But eight kings of marshy Egypt
shall fill out the number of years — three and thirty
added to two hundred. But the race shall utterly perish —
not all of them — yet from the root there shall spring up
a woman, a destroyer of mortals, betrayer of her own kingdom.
But they themselves, in wickedness, shall work evil deeds
against one another thereafter, and one shall destroy another;