I have been looking into the historical mostly mythological history of cicadas because of cicada 3301 and stumbled across tithonus and greek mytholigy can anyone tell me about how greek mythology mentions tithonus/cicadas especially the sibyline books I know it could be a bit of work but if you already know something about greek mythology I would be so grateful!!(sorry about spelling writing isnt realy my strong point but I tried my best)
There's a muddle of three stories going on here, but the common theme is being immortal, but ageing until you shrivel away -- and, in at least one version, changing into a cicada, leaving behind only your voice and just a tiny husk of your original body.
Tithonos in Greek myth is the husband of the dawn goddess, Eos. She managed to arrange to get him made immortal, but forgot to ask for him to be ageless. As a result he grew older and older and more and more shrivelled, until he was just a withered husk babbling away eternally in a locked room.
There's a similar story about one Sibyl. The Sibyls were a set of legendary prophetesses. The development of their myth is a tangled topic, but we don't need to worry about it for this purpose. There's a story in two 1st century CE fictional sources, Ovid's Metamorphoses 14.129-152 and Petronius' Satyrica 48, where the Sibyl of Cumae is granted a wish by the god Apollo. She wishes for as many years to her life as there are grains in a pile of dust. But she too forgets to ask for youthfulness, and as a result she is destined to waste away, shrivelled to a tiny husk hanging in a basket.
The cicada is an obscure addendum to both of these stories. There's an ancient commentary on one version of Tithonos' story, in Lykophron's Alexandra, which relates that as a result of his change, Tithonos eventually turned into a cicada (scholion on Alexandra line 18). I think this ending is implicit in Ovid's version of the story of the Sibyl, too: she finishes her story saying "I shall carry on, changed so much that no one will recognise me; but I'll be known by my voice, the fates will leave me my voice."
The Sibylline books appear in another story about the Sibyl of Cumae, but other than the Sibyl herself, they have nothing to do with the story about withering away. In that story, the Sibyl supposedly came to the last king of Rome, Tarquinius the Proud, in the late 6th century BCE, and sold the books to him at an exorbitant price. (The story is myth, but the books did exist in some form at one point: we're told they were destroyed in a fire in the 1st century BCE.)
Incidentally, if you try reading Wikipedia or somesuch on the Sibylline books, beware of mixing them up with a group of surviving Judaeo-Christian poems called the Sibylline Oracles. They're completely unrelated.