The Sibyl · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The word of the Sibyl, book thirteen.
God bids me sing a mighty word,
the holy, undying, imperishable God, who to kings
gave power and took it away, and marked out for them their time,
of both together, of life and of ruinous death.
And these things the God of heaven forces me, unwilling,
to declare to kings, concerning the royal power.
And the raging spear of Ares; and by it all shall perish.
A child-ruler, once born, shall give judgment in the assemblies;
for many wars and battles and slaughters of men,
famines and plagues, earthquakes and consuming thunderbolts,
and many Assyrian crossings, throughout the whole world,
and plundering and the robbing of temples.
And then the uprising of the Persians, men of bread-winning toil,
and of Indians and Armenians and Arabs together; and against these
a Roman king shall draw near, insatiable for war,
leading spearmen even against the Assyrians, a new Ares;
as far as the deep-flowing, silver-eddying Euphrates
he shall stretch out, sending forth his warlike spear, that Ares,
for the sake of... and betrayed by a companion
he shall fall in the battle-line, struck by gleaming iron.
Straightway again shall rule a purple-loving spearman,
appearing out of Syria, a terror to Ares, and upon his son
Caesar too, and he shall lay waste all the land; and the name
shall be one for both of them; upon the twenty-first
there are set five hundreds. And when these
shall rule in wars, and become dispensers of law,
there shall be a brief respite from war, not for long;
but when the wolf shall pledge oaths to the flock
before the white-toothed dogs, and afterward shall do harm,
wounding the woolly sheep, and shall cast the oaths away,
then shall come lawless strife of overweening kings
in wars, and the Syrians shall perish terribly,
Indians and Armenians, Arabs, Persians, Babylonians.
They shall destroy one another in mighty battles.
But when the Roman Ares shall destroy the German
Ares, conquering him who devours the spirit of the ocean,
then upon the Persians too, men overweening,
shall come a war of many years, and victory shall not be theirs;
for as upon a high, wind-swept, many-ridged
sheer rock the fish does not swim upon the summit,
nor does the tortoise fly, nor does the eagle swim into water,
so too the Persians shall be far removed from victory
on that day, for as long as the dear nurse of the Italians,
lying in the plain of the Nile beside its divinely-ordained water,
shall send to seven-hilled Rome her portion of the season.
These things are fated; and as many as the name Rome holds in number, when the time is reckoned up,
so many years shall she willingly measure out grain to you,
O splendid great city of the Macedonian lord.
And another grief, full of much toil, will I sing for the men of Alexandria.