IX. Such was my answer to Boethus, and to the same effect about the Sibyl and her utterances. For when we stood near the rock by the Council Chamber, on which the first Sibyl is said to have been seated on her arrival from Helicon, where she had been brought up by the Muses (though others say that she came from the Maleans, and was the daughter of Lamia the daughter of Poseidon), Serapion remembered the verses in which she hymned herself; how she will never cease from [Sidenote: D] prophesying, even after death, but will herself go round in the moon, being turned into what we call the ‘bright face’, while her breath is mingled with the air and borne about in rumours and voices for ever and ever; and her body within the earth suffers change, so that from it spring grass and weeds, the pasture of sacred cattle, which have all colour, shapes, and qualities in their inward parts whereby men obtain forecasts of future things. Here Boethus made his derision still more evident. [Sidenote: E] The stranger observed that, although these things have a mythical appearance, yet the prophecies are attested by many overturnings and removals of Greek cities, inroads of barbarian hordes, and upsettings of dynasties. ‘These still recent troubles at Cumae and Dicaearchia[91], were they not chanted long ago in the songs of the Sibyl, so that Time was only discharging his debts in the fires which have burst out of the mountain, the boiling seas, the masses of burning rocks[92] tossed aloft by the winds, the ruin of cities many and great, so that if you visit them in broad daylight you cannot get a clear idea of the site, the ground being covered with confused ruins? It is [Sidenote: F] hard to believe that such things have happened, much harder to predict them without divine power.’