the oracles were his
commands, but it is almost certain that Apollo came to Rome in advance
of the oracles. He came there as a god of healing and was given a sacred
place outside the _pomerium_ in the Campus Martius, on the spot where
later (B.C. 431) a temple was built for him with his sister
Artemis-Diana and their mother Latona. This was the only state temple
that Apollo ever had, until Augustus built the famous one on the
Palatine. It was in the wake of Apollo that the Sibylline books came. As
for the books themselves, they were kept so secret that we cannot expect
to know much about them, but in rare cases where the seriousness of the
exigency warranted it, the Senate permitted the actual publication of
the oracle upon which its action was based, and of the oracles thus
published one or two have been preserved to us. They were of course
written in Greek and were phrased in the ambiguous style which for
obvious reasons was the most advantageous style for oracles. They
commanded the worship of certain specific deities, naturally all of them
Greek, and the performance of certain more or less complicated ritual
acts. When they were received in Rome, they were placed in the temple of
Juppiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline in the keeping of their
guardians, the new priesthood of the "two men in charge of the
sacrifices." This committee of two was enlarged to ten in B.C. 367 when
the great compromise between the Patricians and the Plebeians was made,
and the Plebeians were admitted into this one priesthood, with five
representatives. Subsequently Sulla made the number fifteen, which
continued as the official number from that time on, so that the
priesthood is ordinarily called the _Quindecemviri_, even when one of
the older periods is referred to. The real control of the books however
lay in the hands of the Senate. When the Senate saw fit, the priests
were ordered to consult the books, but without this special command even
their guardians dared not approach them. The priests reported to the
Senate what they had found, and the Senate then decreed whatever actions
the oracles commanded. The carrying out of these actions was again in
the charge of the Sibylline priests, who performed the ceremonies
demanded and were for all time to come responsible for the maintenance
of any new cults which might be introduced.

When we see how carefully these oracles were guarded and how
circumspectly their use was hedged about by sena