I think you are right. I think the epigraph tells us a lot. It refers to 'the Sybil' a Greek prophetess who wrote Appollo's oracles/prophecies on leaves which t

I think you are right. I think the epigraph tells us a lot. It refers to 'the Sybil' a Greek prophetess who wrote Appollo's oracles/prophecies on leaves which then scattered in the wind before followers had a chance to digest their information. If we take these leaves to represent the deeply significant facts/patterns/secrets of a civilization, the classicist has had time to 'gather the leaves' and make sense of it all. In The Waste Land the leaves of modern times are gathered, but no sense has been made, or some are missing. In fact, as the epigraph says, the Sybil 'wants to die.' The process through which deeper meaning/understanding is generated and dispersed cannot sustain itself any longer, because the dispersal, the scattering, is too violent. The epigraph actually being written in ancient Greek with no translation provided is the icing on the cake.