The Sibyl · a new plain-English translation from the original language
whom men call by another name, lord Dionysus.
But when the murderous lion and the murderous lioness
shall tear the famed purple royal robe,
*they shall crush in the lung of the hastening kingdom*,
and then the holy lord, who received the first of the letters,
having exchanged hostile rulers for victory,
shall give them over to be food for dogs and birds.
Woe to you, fire-scorched city, mighty Rome,
how greatly you shall suffer, once all this has befallen.
But then the great king, the far-renowned, thereafter
with gold and amber and silver and ivory
shall raise you up entire, and in splendor you shall surpass all before,
in possessions and temples, markets, riches, and stadiums;
and then again you shall be a light to all, as you were before.
Ah, wretched Cecropians, Cadmeans, and Laconians,
who around the Peneus and the deep-reeded Molossus,
Trikke and Dodona and lofty-built Ithome,
the Pierian ridge, and the great height of Olympus,
Ossa and Larissa and high-gated Calydon,
But when God shall make a great sign for mortals,
a daylight darkened, dim, over all the world,
then for you, o king, shall come the end, nor shall you escape
the sharp bow of your own brother, aimed against you.
And then again shall reign a soul-destroying, boundless burning one
of the royal line, who shall be of Egyptian stock,
younger indeed, but far braver than his kinsman,
who took up the stamped rule numbering eighty;
and then the soul-grieving wrath of the immortal God
the whole world shall receive into its bosom for the sake of honor;
for there shall come upon short-lived mortal men
famines and plagues and wars and slaughters of men,
and unwearied darkness upon the mother earth of peoples,
and disorder of seasons and merciless wrath,
earthquakes from heaven and blazing thunderbolts,
and showers of stone and parching drizzling rains.
The steep peaks of the Phrygian land were shaken again,
the feet of the Scythian mountains were shaken, the cities trembled,
and all the earth trembled together with the land of Greece.
And many cities, while God raged in his great fury,
shall fall prostrate beneath smoking thunderbolts
and lamentations, nor can wrath be fled or escaped.
And then again the king shall fall by the hand of his own army,
struck down as no man ever was by his own people.
After him many men of the Latins shall rise up again,
men clad in purple mantles about their shoulders,
who shall be content to take the royal rule by lot.
And then three kings upon the shining walls of Rome
shall be, two holding first the number,
and one bearing strife, the renamed one, as no other ever was;
these themselves shall love Rome and the whole world