In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which ancient figure appears in the opening epigraph?

In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the opening epigraph features the Cumaean Sibyl.

The epigraph comes from Petronius’s Satyricon and describes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar and wishing to die. In the original Latin passage, children ask what she wants, and she answers that she wants death. Eliot used the quotation to establish the poem’s atmosphere of exhaustion, fragmentation, and distorted time before the first section begins.

The Cumaean Sibyl was an ancient prophetic figure associated with Cumae, a Greek colony in Italy. In Roman literary tradition, she was also connected with Aeneas and the underworld journey in Virgil’s Aeneid. Eliot’s use of her therefore activates several earlier classical texts at once.

A common mistake is to identify the epigraph as Cassandra or the Delphic Oracle, both familiar prophetic figures from Greek mythology. The wording and source specifically point to the Cumaean Sibyl. The Waste Land was published in 1922 and became a defining poem of literary modernism.