one, and
that it was filled with water which was allowed to run over the edge, as
a means of inducing the rain-god to suffer the heavens to overflow.[89]
It was called _lapis manalis_; and the epithet here can have nothing to
do with the Manes, as in the case of another _lapis manalis_, of which I
shall have a word to say later on, but must mean "pouring" or
"overflowing." One or two other fragments of evidence point in the same
direction, and I think we may fairly conclude that the rite was
originally one of sympathetic magic--that as the stone overflowed, so
the sky would pour down rain. In my _Roman Festivals_ I have pointed out
a remarkable parallel to this in the collections of the _Golden Bough_;
in a Samoan village a stone represented the god of rain, and in a
drought his priests carried it in procession and dipped it in a stream.

This parallel I owe to Dr. Frazer's wide knowledge of all such practices
among savage peoples. But this ever helpful and friendly guide, in
treating of the Jupiter Elicius concerned in this ceremony, has gone
beyond the evidence, and attributed to the Romans another kind of magic
of which I believe they were quite innocent. He has been led to this by
his theory that kings were developed out of successful magicians. In his
lectures on the early history of the Kingship[90] he maintains that the
Roman kings practised the magical art of bringing down lightning from
heaven. "The priestly king Numa passed for an adept in the art of
drawing down lightning from the sky.... Tullus Hostilius is reported to
have met with the same end (as Salmoneus, king of Elis) in an attempt to
draw down Jupiter in the form of lightning from the clouds." To support
these statements Dr. Frazer quotes Pliny, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch,
Arnobius, Aurelius Victor, and Zonaras--truly a formidable list of
authorities; but without any attempt to discover where any of these late
writers found the stories. Yet he had but to read Aust's admirable
article "Jupiter" in the _Mythological Lexicon_[91] to assure himself
that legends which cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the
second century B.C. cannot seriously be assumed to be genuinely Roman.
Pliny happens to mention Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the
man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first _lex
de repetundis_ of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an
annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.[92] We happen