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 senatorial control, and when we think how relatively little harm the use of oracles had wrought in Greece in all the centuries of her history, it may well seem as if the statements made in the beginning of this chapter about the havoc caused by these oracles were grossly exaggerated.  But the efforts of the Senate to safeguard these oracles only prove that the older and wiser men in the community realised how dangerous they were, and the comparison with Greece leads to a consideration of certain essential differences between the Greek and the Roman temperament which made that which was meat for one into poison for the other.