uin, ignorant of the value of the
books, refused to buy them. The Sibyl departed, and burned three of
them. Coming back immediately, she offered the remaining six at the
same price that she had asked for the nine. Tarquin again refused;
whereupon the Sibyl burned three more volumes, and returning the third
time, made the same demand for the reduced remnant. Struck with the
singularity of the proceeding, the king consulted the augurs; and
learning from them the inestimable preciousness of the books, he
bought them, and the Sibyl forthwith vanished as mysteriously as she
had appeared. This legend reads like a moral apothegm on the
increasing value of life as it passes away.

Whatever credence we may attach to this account of their origin--or
rather, whatever sediment of historical truth may have been
precipitated in the fable--there can be no doubt that the so-called
Sibylline books of Rome did actually exist, and that for a very long
period they were held in the highest veneration. They were concealed
in a stone chest, buried under the ground, in the temple of Jupiter,
on the Capitol. Two officers of the highest rank were appointed to
guard them, whose punishment, if found unfaithful to their trust, was
to be sewed up alive in a sack and thrown into the sea. The number of
guardians was afterwards increased, at first to ten and then to
fifteen, whose priesthood was for life, and who in consequence were
exempted from the obligation of serving in the army and from other
public offices in the city. Being regarded as the priests of Apollo,
they had each in front of his house a brazen tripod, similar to that
on which the priestess of Delphi sat.

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, aft