Pompeii (novel) - Ironic Prophecy

Ironic Prophecy

Faced with the eruption, which threatens to utterly destroy his hard-built fortune and power, Ampliatus clings to the prophecy which he heard from Pompeii's resident sybil. After sacrificing a snake to an ancient god, the sybil had supposedly prophesied that even after the passage of millennia, when the Roman Empire and its emperors have long since gone into the dust, the name of Pompeii will be known throughout the world and people of every tongue will wander its streets and enter its amphitheaters. It is this prophecy which encourages Ampliatus to stay in the embattled city and keep his family and household there – to the death of all of them but Corelia.

The reader, of course, knows (though Ampliatus cannot) that the sybil spoke the truth, but that Pompeii's enduring fame would not result from its being spared the eruption. On the contrary, precisely by being engulfed and covered up for many centuries, only to be rediscovered and provide modern archaeologists with a uniquely preserved Roman city, gave Pompeii its enduring fame – far too late for its hapless first century citizens to have any benefit.

No such prophecy is mentioned in any actual Roman text. However, the device of a true prophecy which is disastrously misunderstood and leading to wrong action is well-attested in the Classical World, for example the case of Croesus who was told that if he goes to war with Persia he would destroy a great kingdom – which ended up turning out to refer to his own kingdom, conquered and annexed by Cyrus as a result of the war to which Croesus was encouraged by the prophecy.