Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable/Sibylline Verses

by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer

Sibylline Verses. When the Sibylline books were destroyed (see above), all the floating verses of the several Sibyls were carefully collected and deposited in the new temple of Jupiter. Augustus had some 2,000 of these verses destroyed as spurious, and placed the rest in two gilt cases, under the base of the statue of Apollo, in the temple on the Palatine Hill; but the whole perished when the city was burnt in the reign of Nero. (See Sibyls [of the mediæval monks].)