In Ancient Rome, the texts of the so-called pagan Sybilline Oracles were regularly examined at times of distress. After the first of these oracular collections was destroyed by fire along with the Temple of Jupiter in 83 BCE, they were gradually replaced with others that revealed a distinct Judeo-Christian influence. These caused much early Christian, medieval, and Renaissance speculation that Christ's coming might indeed have bee revealed to the pagan Romans, and were thus treated as genuine by some well into the sixteenth century. Indeed, Michelangelo granted the Sybils pride of place across from the Hebrew prophets in his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
This 1697 text, a paginary reprint of the earlier 1599 edition, constitutes the first significant demolition of the Sybilline texts as late-antique foregries—a line of contentious argument that would persist for decades more, until they were completely disproven, once nad for all, by the later seventeenth century Huguenot scholar David Blondel.
