win from it
a languid smile of faintest verdure. The sight of the scanty walls and
scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless
ages that have left no other memorials of their activity. What is fact
and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away
borderland where they seem to blend. And I do not envy the man who is
not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that
placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe
with which the mysterious divinity of Cumae was worshipped by
generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves--whose very
graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages
before our history had begun.

Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the
Sibyl. It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later
Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid
by some in Cumae--where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of
his life in exile--and by others in Rome. But the majority of writers
associate it with the building of the great temple of Jupiter on the
Capitoline Hill. Several prodigies, significant of the future fate of
Rome and of the reigning dynasty, occurred when the foundations of
this temple were dug and the walls of it built. A fresh human head,
dripping gore, was found deep down beneath the earth, which implied
that this spot was destined to become the head of the whole world; and
hence the old name of the "Saturnine Hill" was changed to the
"Capitoline." All the gods who had been worshipped from time
immemorial on this hill, when consulted by auguries, gave permission
for the removal of their shrines and altars in order that room might
be provided for the gigantic temple of the great Ruler of the gods,
save Terminus and Youth, who refused to abandon the sacred spot, and
whose obstinacy was therefore regarded as a sign that the boundaries
of the city should never be removed, and that her youth would be
perpetually renewed. But a still more wonderful sign of the future of
Rome was given on this occasion. A mysterious woman, endowed with
preternatural longevity--believed to be no other than Deiphobe, the
Cumaean Sibyl herself, the daughter of Circe and Gnostus, who had been
the guide of AEneas into the world of the dead--appeared before Tarquin
and offered him for a certain price nine books, which contained her
prophecies in mystic rhyme. Tarq