er having been purged
from all spurious or suspected elements; and the volume was brought to
Rome, and deposited in two gilt cases at the base of the statue of
Apollo, in the temple of that god on the Palatine.

More than two thousand prophetic books, pretending to be Sibylline
oracles, were found by Augustus in the possession of private persons;
and these were condemned to be burned, and in future no private person
was allowed to keep any writings of the kind. But in spite of every
attempt to authenticate the books that were publicly accepted, the new
collection was never regarded with the same veneration as the original
volumes of Tarquin which it replaced. A certain suspicion of
spuriousness continued to cling to it, and greatly diminished its
authority. It was seldom consulted. The Roman emperors after
Tiberius--who still further sifted it--utterly neglected the
received collection; and not till shortly before the fatal battle of
the Milvian Bridge, which overthrew paganism, was it again brought
out, by Maxentius, for the purpose of indicating the fate of the
enterprise. Julian the Apostate, in his attempt to galvanise the dead
pagan religion into the semblance of life, sought to revive an
interest in the Sibylline oracles, which were so closely identified
with the political and religious fortunes of Rome. But his effort was
vain: they fell into greater oblivion than before; and at last they
were publicly burned by Stilicho, the father-in-law of the Emperor
Honorius--called the Defender of Italy--whose own execution as a
traitor at Ravenna shortly afterwards was considered by the pagan
zealots as the just vengeance of the gods on his dreadful sacrilege.

Unlike the Jewish and Indian faiths, the Greek and Roman religions had
no authoritative writings, and were not embodied in a system of
elaborate dogmas. The Sibylline oracles may therefore be said to have
formed their sacred scriptures, and to have served the purpose of a
common religious creed in securing national unity. The original books
of the Cumaean Sibyl were written in Greek, which was the language of
the whole of the south of Italy at that time. The oracles were
inscribed upon palm leaves; to which circumstance Virgil alludes in
his description of the sayings of the Cumaean Sibyl being written upon
the leaves of the forest. They were in the form of acrostic verses;
the letters of the first verse of each oracle containing in regular
sequence the initial le