The Sobered Sibyl: Gender, Apocalypse, and Hair in Dio Chrysostom’s Discourse 1 and the Shepherd of Hermas

D’Angelo, Mary R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-14965-9_2

Mary R. D’Angelo⁵

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

371 Accesses

Abstract

Among Ann Matter’s many contributions to medieval studies are her investigations of women political prophets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These women had a long prehistory in women seers of antiquity, particularly Virgil’s Sibyl of Cumae, whose role in legitimating the Roman order carried her personae into the early Christian imagination and on into the medieval thought world. Two texts of the early second century CE appropriated and modified the paradigmatic features of the Sibyl to create women prophets whose appearance signaled an end to one world and the dawn of another. Dio Chrysostom’s Discourse 1 and the Shepherd of Hermas, like Aeneid 6, display features central to Jewish and Christian apocalypses. Each includes a woman mediator whose garb and hair are significant indices of her prophetic status. While Virgil’s Sibyl’s loosened hair and tossing head are proofs of the mania which was understood to validate prophecy, the women prophets of Dio and Hermas warrant both predictions and instruction in virtue by their controlled hair and decorous demeanor.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 109.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 139.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
See, e.g., E. Ann Matter and Gabriella Zarri, Una mistica contestata: La vita di Lucia da Narni (1476–1544) tra agiografia e autobiografia (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2011); Matter, “Lucia Brocadelli: Seven Revelations Introduced and Translated,” in Dominican Penitent Women, ed. Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 212–43; Matter, “Prophetic Patronage as Repression: Lucia Brocadelli da Narni and Ercole D’Este,” in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 100–1500, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–76; Matter, “The Commentary on the Rule of Clare of Assisi by Maria Domitilla Galluzzi,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 201–11; Matter, “Discourses of Desire: Sexuality and Christian Women’s Visionary Narratives,” Journal of Homosexuality 18 (1989): 119–32.
2.
“The Personal and the Paradigm: The Book of Maria Domitilla Galluzzi,” in The Crannied Wall: Women Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig A. Monson. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 87–103, at 97–103.
3.
It plays a significant role in the exegesis of Berengaudus and Joachim of Fiore and later emerges transformed in the poetry of Donne and Sor Juana de la Cruz. See Eric Knibbs, “Berengaudus on the Apocalypse”; Bernard McGinn, “Apocalypticism and Mysticism in Joachim of Fiore’s Expositio in Apocalypsim ”; Marcia L. Colish, “End Time at Hand: Innocent III, Joachim of Fiore and the Third Crusade”; Angela Locatelli, “Amorous and Religious Apocalypses in the sermons and Poetry of John Donne”; and Jessica Boon, “The Marian Apocalyptic of a Visionary Preacher: The Conorte of Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534,” all in this volume.
4.
See Adela Yarbro Collins, “Introduction: Early Christian Apocalypses,” Semeia 36 (1986): 1–11, at 7. The collaboration in research is represented by Semeia 14 (1979) and Semeia 36.
5.
H. W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, ed. B. C. McGing (London: Routledge, 1988), 64–67.
6.
Parke, Sibyls, 7.
7.
Parke, Sibyls, 9.
8.
For example: 3.10.5–7, 4.25.3, 5.13.4–8.
9.
“Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;/magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo” (Ecl 4.4–5) and “…surget gens aurea…” (Ecl. 4.9).
10.
Harold W. Attridge, “Greek and Latin Apocalypses,” Semeia 14 (1979): 166.
11.
John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 28.
12.
“Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet/saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva/Saturna quondam, super et Garamantes et Indos/proferet imperium” (6.791–808).
13.
“Furens”: 6.100, 102, 261; “rabida”: 6.46, 80, 102; “horrenda”: 6.12; “bacchatur”: 6.78.
14.
“…non voltus, non color unus,/non comptae mansere comae, sed pectus anhelum,/et rabie fera corda tument, maiorque videri/nec mortale sonans…” (6.47–50). H. R. Fairclough, trans., revised by G. P. Gould, Virgil, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 265.
15.
“haec cecinit uates et te sibi, Phoebe, uocauit,/iactauit fusas et caput ante comas,” Carmina 2.65–66.
16.
“Deo furibunda accepto,” Metamorphoses 14.107.
17.
Metamorphoses 14.129–54. Also on the age of the Sibyl, see Propertius, Elegies 2.24B.33.
18.
Appropriated by T. S. Eliot as the epigraph for The Wasteland.
19.
Parke, Sibyls, 147.
20.
“Bacchatur demens aliena per antrum/Colla ferens, uittasque dei Phoebeaque serta/Erectis discussa comis per inania templi/Ancipiti ceruice rotat spargitque uaganti/obstantis tripodas magnoque exaestuat igne/iratum te, Phoebe, ferens.” De Bello Civili 5.169–74. Translation from J. D. Duff, Lucan: The Civil War Loeb Classical Library 220 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 251. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
21.
“albam crinibus infulisque cerno,” 4.3120.
22.
“en! et colla rotat novisque late/bacchatur spatiis viamque replet,” 4.3.121–22.
23.
“Salve dux hominum et parens deorum,” 4.3.139; “En hic est deus, hunc iubet beatis/pro se Iuppiter imperare terris,” 4.3.128–29. The allusion to gods of whom Domitian is parens may both refer to the child who was born in 73, died very young, and was deified shortly after Domitian’s accession, and also constitute another prophecy of other children yet unborn. In fact Domitian was the last of his dynasty. See Pat Southern, Domitian Tragic Tyrant (London: Routledge, 1997), 28–29.
24.
Seneca, Ad Polybium 8.2, 11.5.
25.
Parke, Sibyls, 147.
26.
Julian Bennett prefers “On Sovereignty.” See Bennett, Trajan Optimus Princeps , 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 67 and 253, Footnote 39. Two of the eighty are actually the work of Dio’s student Favorinus.
27.
For the common practice of deducing Trajan’s propaganda from coins, monuments, and the correspondences between Pliny’s Panegyric and the four Discourses Peri Basileias, see Bennett, Optimus Princeps , 63–73.
28.
Pliny also makes this contrast; a particularly Latin version appears in Panegyric 45.3: “Scis ut sint diversa natura dominatio et principatus” (“You know that lordliness and principate are by nature opposed”).
29.
See Bennett, Optimus Princeps 67 and 253, Footnote 41.
30.
For “message” as a translation of logos, see especially its use to refer to an oracular pronouncement. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones et al., A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. logos VII.1, citing Plato, Phaedrus 275b and Apology 20; also its use to mean narrative (s.v. logos V).
31.
A less circumspect account of his exile describes Domitian as a hostile daimon, contrasting him with his philanthropic successors, Nerva and Trajan, all still unnamed but completely recognizable (Discourse 45, 1–3).
32.
Metamorphoses 4.30–54, Satyricon 48; see above.
33.
Discourse 45, 4 suggests that a god of a city in Asia Minor had predicted Domitian’s assassination; Discourse 66, 7 seems to have been written before 96 and to predict the death of Domitian and the end of the Flavian dynasty; see H. L. Crosby, Dio Chrysostom: Vol. 5, Loeb Classical Library 385 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), 87 and 95, n. 4.
34.
The Greek word I have translated “of strength” implies both might and control; Liddell, Scott and Jones, s.v. karteros.
35.
Bennett, Optimus Princeps , 72.
36.
For Philo’s use of the choice of Herakles, see Carlos Levy, “Philo’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Adam Kamesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–74, at 151.
37.
“…panu egkratōs kai sōfronōs…” (53).
38.
See Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Early Christian Apocalypses,” Semeia 14 (1979): 61–121. She classified it among “apocalypses of cosmic and/or political eschatology with neither historical review nor otherworldly journey” (70, 74–75).
39.
Carolyn Osiek, “The Genre and Function of the Shepherd of Hermas,” Semeia 36 (1986): 113–21; The Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 10–12.
40.
Osiek, Shepherd, 18–20.
41.
On issues of integrity and authorship, see Osiek, Shepherd, 8–10.
42.
Osiek, Shepherd, 16, 58.
43.
On these cues, see also Osiek, Shepherd, 58.
44.
David O’Brien has explored the use of the figure of the Sibyl in the prophecy; he suggests that the author wishes to appeal to Roman converts who held the Sibyl in high esteem, and that the prophecy promotes a theologoumenon about God as creator from nothing that he views as consonant with the theology of Sibylline Oracles; “The Cumaen Sibyl as the Revelation-Bearer in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997): 473–96; see especially 485 and 487.
45.
The Greek texts read eis kōmas, “to the countryside,” at Vis 1.1.3 and 2.1.1; among the Latin texts, L² reads eis koumas, “to Cumae,” at Vis 1.1.3 and LL has this reading at Vis 2.1.1. This reading has been widely rejected on the basis of the Greek texts and the view that the 130 miles to Cumae make such a journey implausible; so Osiek, Shepherd, 43. It is possible that Hermas’ identification of the woman as the Sibyl suggested the Latin reading, as no other Sibyls are likely to have been frequenting the countryside of Rome.
46.
On masculinity in Hermas, see Stephen Young, “Being a Man: The Pursuit of Manliness in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 237–55.
47.
Osiek emphasizes that the descriptions cast Faith and Enkrateia as defenders of the tower; Shepherd, 77–78.
48.
Kirsopp Lake offers a diagram; Apostolic Fathers: Vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 25 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), 221, Footnote 1.
49.
The first four are linked by the alpha privative: Apistia, Akrasia, Apeitheia, Apatē. These women do not correspond perfectly to the virgins in white.
50.
Hilara, Vis 1.4.3 [4], 3.12.1 [20], 13.1 [21].
51.
For a description of the seat, see P. W. Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), s. v. subsellium.
52.
The description may be formed in part by the Septuagint version of Ps. 18.6 (19.6 in the Masoretic text and the current numbering of the Psalms).
53.
Osiek compares this description to the outfit of the bride in the Augustan wall painting called the Aldobrandini wedding; the painting lacks only the mitra. She rightly rejects attempts to explain the mitra by the headgear of the high priest (Shepherd 93, Footnote 29); it does suggest ritual garb throughout the Mediterranean, and could be worn by women as well as men.
54.
Osiek rejects the idea that this fourth apparition is the Church as bride of Christ (93), I think rightly. Nothing in the vision evokes the sort of imagery found in Eph 5:23–32 or 2 Clement 14. She also rejects her identification with the end time, suggesting instead that she is the image of the community transformed by acceptance of the prophetic message. While these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, the content of her interpretation and the fact that this is her last appearance seem to affirm her eschatological status.
55.
For a careful exposition of his work, see Laura Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity HTS 32 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 95–154.
56.
Philo’s treatment of ecstasy in Who Is the Heir of Divine Things is extensive and sophisticated; see Nasrallah’s analysis of the taxonomy of altered states in Philo in Ecstasy of Folly, 36–44.
57.
Somn 2.1, Migr 35, Opif 71, Her 69, Contemp 12, 85.
58.
On the lash as symbol of frenzy and divine madness, see Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Religions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 104.
59.
See also Nasrallah, Ecstasy of Folly, esp. 91–94.
60.
See D’Angelo, “Veils, Virgins and the Tongues of Men and Angels: Women’s Heads as Sexual Members in Ancient Christianity,” in Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwarz and Wendy Doniger (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 131–64; reprinted in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth A. Castelli with assistance from Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 389–419; reprinted in Arabic translation as “Aghteiyat alru’uus, wa al‘adhara, wa alsinat alrrijal wa almalaika: ru’uus alnnisaa fi almasihieya almobakira,” in Gender and Religious Studies. The Women and Memory Feminist Translation Series, ed. Omaima Abu Bakr (Giza, Egypt: Women and Memory Forum, 2012), 115–43.
61.
Antoinette Clark Wire has made this argument in Corinthian Women Prophets : A Reconstruction Through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990).
62.
Note Burkert’s discussion of the strikingly similar image from the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii; see also D’Angelo, “Veils, Virgins,” 151.
63.
Mary Taliaferro Boatwright, “Plancia Magna of Perge: Women’s Roles and Status in Roman Asia Minor,” in Women’s History and Ancient History, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1991), 242–78; Shelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Mary R. D’Angelo

Authors

Mary R. D’Angelo
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich, Germany
Eric Knibbs
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Jessica A. Boon
Wellesley, MA, USA
Erica Gelser

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

D’Angelo, M.R. (2019). The Sobered Sibyl: Gender, Apocalypse, and Hair in Dio Chrysostom’s Discourse 1 and the Shepherd of Hermas. In: Knibbs, E., Boon, J., Gelser, E. (eds) The End of the World in Medieval Thought and Spirituality. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14965-9_2

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14965-9_2
Published: 28 April 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14964-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14965-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics