omes was at Cumae in Campania, the oldest Greek city in
Italy, and this enables us to explain easily how the name and fame of
the Sibyl reached Rome. Dim as is all early Roman history, the one clear
fact of the sixth century is, as we have seen, the rapid advance of the
Etruscans, their occupation of Rome, Praeneste, and other Latin cities,
and their conquest of Campania, which is now ascribed to that same
age.[541] Legend told in later days how the last Etruscan king had taken
refuge at Cumae after his expulsion from Rome, and it is just possible
that it may here be founding upon some dim recollection of a fact.
However this may be, it is plain that it was through the great Etruscan
disturbance of that period that Rome came to make trial of Sibylline
utterances. In a moment of distress--the famine of which I spoke just
now, and which I take to be historical because the remedy, the temple
under the Aventine, was so closely connected with the corn-supply--she
sent for or admitted an utterance of the Sibyl of Cumae, with whom she
had come into some kind of contact through her Etruscan kings.

Let us consider that this foreign dynasty must have brought a new
population to the city on the Tiber, the chief strategic point of middle
Italy,--a new element of plebs, whatever the old one may have been.[542]
We have seen signs, even in the religious history of this age, that
commerce and industry were increasing, and that their increase was due
to a movement from without, rather than to the old patrician _gentes_.
When the Etruscan dynasty fell and the old patrician influence was
restored, the government must have been face to face with new
difficulties, and among them the supply of corn for an increasing
population in years of bad harvest. With a fresh source of supply from
the south came the cult of the Greek corn-deities at the bidding of a
Sibylline utterance; and henceforward that remedy was available for
other troubles. But the patrician rulers of Rome were true, it would
seem, as far as was possible, to the old ways, and for a long time they
used this foreign remedy very sparingly. At what date the utterances
were collected in "books" and deposited in the Capitoline temple we do
not know, nor have we any certain knowledge of their original nature or
form. Tradition said that the collection dated from the last king's
reign, and that it was placed in the care of _duoviri sacris faciundis_,
as we have seen, who in 367 B.C. gav