ding the broken-down cella, whose familiar appearance is often
represented in plaster models and bronze and marble ornamental
articles, taken home as souvenirs by travellers; and the other stands
close by, and has been transformed into the present church of St.
Giorgio. This latter temple is supposed, from a bas-relief found in
it, representing the Sibyl sitting in the act of delivering an oracle,
to be the ancient shrine of the Sibyl Albunea mentioned by Horace,
Tibullus, and Lactantius. The earliest bronze statues at Rome were
those of the three Sibyls, placed near the Rostra, in the middle of
the Forum. No specimens of the literature of Rome precede the
Sibylline books, except the rude hymn known as the Litany of the Arval
Brothers, dating from the time of Romulus himself, which is simply an
address to Mars, the Lares, and the Semones, praying for fair weather
and for protection to the flocks. And it is thus most interesting to
notice that the two compositions which lay at the foundation of all
the splendid Latin literature of later ages were of an eminently
religious character.

One of the most remarkable things connected with the pagan Sibyls were
the apocryphal Jewish and Christian prophecies to which they gave
rise. When the sacred oak of Dodona perished down to the ground, out
of its roots sprang up a fresh growth of fictitious prophetic
literature. This literature emanated from different nationalities and
different schools of thought. It combined classical story and
Scripture tradition. Most of it was the product of pre-Christian
Judaism, and seemed to have been composed in times of great national
excitement. The misery of the present, the prospect still more gloomy
beyond, impelled its authors to anxious inquiries into the future. The
books were written, like the genuine Sibylline books, in the metrical
form, which the old Greek tradition had consecrated to religious use;
and their style so closely resembled that of the Apocalypse and the
Old Testament prophecies, that some pagan writers who accepted them as
genuine did not hesitate to say that the writers of the Bible had
plagiarised parts of their prophecies from the oracles of the Sibyls.

Few fragments of the genuine Sibylline books remain to us, and these
are to be found chiefly in the writings of Ovid and Virgil, whose
"Golden Age" and well-known "Fourth Eclogue" were greatly indebted for
their materials to them. But we possess a large collection of the