e the Italian birthright, the blight of Etruria which came
into their nature in spite of themselves. It required centuries to
educate the Roman into the concept of personal individual gods. He had
begun his theological career by terror of unknown powers all about him,
and by regarding religion as the science of propitiating the right power
on the right occasion. One could not know these powers, one did not
desire to. Their gods were at once their masters and their servants, but
never their companions. The early Roman knew no such thing as an oracle,
the only messages from the gods were the expressions of their wrath, in
the sending of prodigies and portents. They did indeed consult the gods
by watching the flight of birds or studying the entrails of the
sacrifice, but it was merely to obtain a "yes or no" answer to a
categorical question as to whether a certain act was pleasing to the
gods. Otherwise all about them lay mystery, and at the point where sight
failed, since neither imagination nor faith carried them any further,
superstition stepped in, and the more they thought of the gods the more
terrified they became. Now if you present to a people thus constituted a
divine book of infallible oracles, you increase their terror in greater
measure than the book itself can assuage it, and with the use of the
book the simpler forms of their old belief will grow less and less
effective in the face of this new "witchcraft," which can work wonders.
And no matter how you may hedge the use of the book about, it will be
used more and more as the craving for magic is increasingly aroused.

The study of the outward and the inward effects of the Sibylline books
is therefore the real history of religion in the first half of the
republic. The outward effects are seen in the introduction of a series
of Greek gods, who were in themselves in the main eminently respectable,
and whose presence was in itself no offence to good morals, and if we
stop there we fail to understand why the religious interest of the
Second Punic War should change so quickly to the scepticism of the
following century. The inward effects however, which, though they are
hard to see, may yet be discovered between the lines of the chronicle,
will explain all the undermining of foundation, until we wonder not why
the structure collapsed so suddenly but how it managed to last so long.

The history of the activity of the books begins peaceably enough. In the
year B.C. 49