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By Root 9909 0

historical library came into my possession some time after his death. It was called "Sibylline Curiosities: being such prophecies found incorporated in the original canon as have been rejected as spurious by the priests of Apollo". The verses were copied out in Augustus' own beautiful script, with the characteristic mis-spellings which, originally made from ignorance, he ever afterwards adhered to as a point of pride. Most of these verses were obviously never spoken by the Sibyl either in ecstasy or out of it, but composed by irresponsible persons who wished to glorify themselves or their houses or to curse the houses of rivals by claiming divine authorship for their own fanciful predictions against them. The Claudian family had been particularly active, I noticed, in these forgeries. Yet I found one or two pieces whose language proved them respectably archaic and whose inspiration seemed divine, and whose plain and alarming sense had evidently decided Augustus—his word was law among the priests of Apollo—against admitting them into his canon.

This little book I no longer have, but I can recall almost every word of the most memorable of these seemingly genuine prophecies, which was recorded both in the original Greek, and (like most of the early pieces in the canon) in rough Latin verse translation. It ran thus:

A hundred years of the Punic Curse

And Rome will be slave to a hairy man,

A hairy man that is scant of hair,

Every man's woman and each woman's man.

The steed that he rides shall have toes for hooves.

He shall die at the hand of his son, no son,

And not on the field of war.

The hairy one next to enslave the State

Shall be son, no son, of this hairy last.

He shall have hair in a generous mop.

He shall give Rome marble in place of clay

And fetter her fast with unseen chains,

And shall die at the hand of his wife, no wife,

To the gain of his son, no son.

The hairy third to enslave the State

Shall be son, no son, of his hairy last.

He shall be mud well mixed with blood,

A hairy man that is scant of hair.

He shall give Rome victories and defeat

And die to the gain of his son, no son—

A pillow shall be his sword.

The hairy fourth to enslave the State

Shall be son, no son, of his hairy last

A hairy man that is scant of hair,

He shall give Rome poisons and blasphemies

And die from a kick of his aged horse

That carried him as a child.

The hairy fifth to enslave the State,

To enslave the State, though against his will,

Shall be that idiot whom all despised.

He shall have hair in a generous mop.

He shall give Rome water and winter bread,

And die at the hand of his wife, no wife,

To the gain of his son, no son.

The hairy sixth to enslave the State

Shall be son, no son, of this hairy last.

He shall give Rome fiddlers and fear and fire.

His hand shall be red with a parent's blood.

No hairy seventh to him succeeds

And blood shall gush from his tomb.

Now, it must have been plain to Augustus that the first of the hairy ones, that is, the Caesars (for Caesar means a head of hair), was his grand-uncle Julius, who adopted him. Julius was bald and he was renowned for his debaucheries with either sex; and his war-charger, as is a matter of public record, was a monster which had toes instead of hooves. Julius escaped alive from many hard-fought battles only to be murdered at last, in the Senate House, by Brutus. And Brutus, though fathered on another, was believed to be Julius' natural son: "Thou too, child!" said Julius, as Brutus came at him with a dagger.

Of the Punic Curse I have already written. Augustus must have recognized in himself the second of the Caesars. Indeed he himself at the end of his life made a boast, looking at the temples and public buildings that he had splendidly re-edified, and thinking too of his life's work in strengthening and glorifying the Empire, that he had found Rome in clay and left her in marble. But as for the manner of his death, be must have found the prophecy either unintelligible or incredible: yet some scruple kept him from destroying it.