The
Cumaean Sybil gives an account of her life to Aeneas in Ovid's Metamorphosis 14.145-234.
He narrates his experience of seeing the
Cumaean Sibyl - a sacred figure in antiquity - in her condemned state, condemned for wishing to live longer.
She has a message for the reader and speaks to him or her: "For on one occasion I myself saw, with my own eyes, the
Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a cage, and when some boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'" (T.S.
Apollo and the
Cumaean Sybil (Wallace Collection) is bound by the terms of its bequest not to be lent from Hertford House, but the pictures from the Musee Conde in Chantilly and the Glasgow Art Gallery are not restricted in the same way.
(15.) For an insightful discussion of the
Cumaean Sibyl's connections to issues of orality and textuality, see Breed 2006, 149-51.
This Phoenician, who drowns in Dante's whirlpool, is Eliot's Ulysses; the withered
Cumaean Sybil quoted in Greek for the poem's epigraph--"I want to die"--is his Tithonus.
This work lives up to its name, and, consoled by it, Christine falls asleep and dreams that she journeys around the world and to heaven and back guided by the
Cumaean Sibyl.
A sympathetic employee of the facility secretly helped him find and buy his own house, a former funeral parlor, and it was there, beneath a plaque inscribed with the
Cumaean Sibyl's pronouncement Apthanein Thelo (I wish to die), that the aging author undertook his final literary labor.
It is, in fact, the
Cumaean Sybil who utters that prophecy in Book VI of the Aeneid, and although she is foreseeing the troubles that come from immigration, it is to the troubles suffered by an immigrant that she refers.