Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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even hear the rippling murmur of the Tiber. The
air seemed to choke them; a cold sweat came out on
their foreheads, and their hands were stiff and
powerless. They thought that something dreadful must
be impending.
But no one liked to show that he was afraid, and
everybody told the emperor that it was a good omen;
nature herself held her breath to greet a new god.
They urged Augustus to hurry, and said that the
old sibyl had probably come up from her cave to
greet his genius.
But the truth was that the old sibyl, engrossed in
a vision, did not even know that Augustus had come
to the Capitol. She was transported in spirit to
a far distant land, where she thought she was
wandering over a great plain. In the darkness she kept
striking her foot against something, which she
thought to be tufts of grass. She bent down and
felt with her hand. No, they were not tufts of
grass, but sheep. She was walking among great
sleeping flocks of sheep.
Then she perceived the fire of the shepherds. It
was burning in the middle of the plain, and she
approached it. The shepherds were lying asleep by
the fire, and at their sides they had long, pointed
staves, with which they defended their flocks from
wild beasts. But the little animals with shining
eyes and bushy tails, which crept forward to the
fire, were they not jackals? And yet the shepherds
did not throw their staves at them; the dogs
continued to sleep; the sheep did not flee; and the wild
beasts lay down to rest beside the men.
All this the sibyl saw, but of what was going on
behind her on the mountain she knew nothing.
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