The contents of the Sibylline books, being supposed to contain the fate of the Roman Empire, were kept a profound secret, and only on occasions of public danger or calamity, and by special order of the senate, were they allowed to be consulted.  When the Capitol was burned in the Marsic war, eighty-two years before Christ, they perished in the flames:  but so seriously was the loss regarded that ambassadors were sent to Greece, Asia Minor, and Cumae, wherever Sibylline inspiration was supposed to exist, to collect the prophetic oracles, and thus make up as far as possible for what had been lost.  In Cumae nothing was discovered; but at Erythraea and Samos a large number of mystic verses, said to have been composed by the Sibyl, were found.  Some of them were collected into a volume, after 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