The Coming of the Sibyl

Jesse Benedict Carter, born in New York in 1872, was a prominent American classicist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a man of broad humanistic range, who had a gift for understanding and explaining the unity of arts and letters. His principal scholarly interest was topography and Roman religion, beginning with his Halle dissertation under Carl Robert (“De Deorum Romanorum cognominibus quaestiones selectae”, printed in Leipzig in 1898).The essay The Coming of the Sibyl, which we bring today to the attention of modern readers, is taken from Jesse Benedict Carter’s basic book The Religion of Numa And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome, published in New York in 1906. It is a fundamental study for understanding the spirit and religious sentiment of ancient Rome and, in particular, to understand the decisive role played by the Sibylline Oracles in the shaping of the most archaic Roman religiosity.