Cumae and the cave of the Sibyl

On the coast of the Phlegraean Fields, north of Pozzuoli, lie the ruins of Cumae, considered the oldest Greek colony on the Italian mainland. It was founded in the eighth century BC by colonists from Euboea, who had already settled the island of Ischia, ancient Pithekoussai. From here Greek culture, and with it the alphabet, spread among the peoples of the peninsula. But Cumae is famous above all for a female figure: the Sibyl, Apollo's prophetess who, according to tradition, uttered her oracles from a cave carved into the rock.

Virgil's Sibyl

The most famous portrayal of the Cumaean Sibyl is found in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Aeneas, having reached Italy, goes to her to ask to descend into the realm of the dead and meet his father Anchises. Virgil describes the priestess possessed by the god, while her dark answers resound from the cave: «horrendas canit ambages antroque remugit». The Sibyl then guides the hero through the entrance to the underworld, which the poet places by nearby Lake Avernus, in a landscape of gloomy woods and vapours.

Ovid, in the «Metamorphoses», tells another story. Apollo, in love with the young woman, granted her as many years of life as the grains of dust she held in her hand, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. Condemned to grow old without dying, the Sibyl wasted away until she became little more than a voice. Petronius, in the «Satyricon», has a character say he saw her hanging in a jar, wishing only to die.

The Sibylline Books

A famous Roman legend is also linked to the Cumaean Sibyl. According to ancient historians, a mysterious old woman offered King Tarquin nine books of prophecies at a very high price. When the king refused, she burned three and asked the same sum for the rest; then she burned three more. The king, struck, bought the last three at the original price. The Sibylline Books were kept on the Capitol and consulted in times of crisis by a college of priests, until they were destroyed in the fire of the temple of Jupiter in 83 BC.

The cave discovered by Maiuri

In 1932 the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri uncovered, beneath the acropolis of Cumae, a long gallery with a trapezoidal cross-section cut into the tuff, more than a hundred metres long, lit by side openings towards the sea and ending in an inner chamber. Struck by its correspondence with Virgil's description, Maiuri identified it with the cave of the Sibyl, and by this name the gallery is still known today to scholars and visitors.

Later studies have questioned the identification, suggesting that the gallery was originally a military work or a passage linked to the fortifications of the acropolis, later reused in different periods. The debate remains open. On the acropolis there are also the remains of temples traditionally attributed to Apollo and Jupiter, turned into churches in the early Christian period, confirming a sacredness that has passed through different religions.

Whatever the original function of the gallery, Cumae remains the place where classical tradition set the boundary between the world of the living and that of prophecy. The Cumaean Sibyl also entered Christian art: Michelangelo painted her on the Sistine Chapel ceiling among the seers said to have foretold the coming of Christ. Walking along the tuff corridor, with light slanting in, helps one understand why poets and pilgrims imagined the voice of the god here.