to
know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of
Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that
king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical
personage. Romulus would not drink wine one day because he was going to
be very busy on the next. Then they said to him, "If we all did so,
Romulus, wine would be cheap." "Nay, dear," he replied, "if every one
drank as much as he wished; and that is exactly what I am doing."[93] I
quote the story simply as a good example of the way in which Roman
historians could deal with their kings, and of the absolute necessity of
acquainting oneself with their methods before building hypotheses upon
their statements. I hardly need to add that another of Dr. Frazer's
authorities, Arnobius, informs us that he took the story from the second
book of Valerius Antias, a later writer than Piso, whose name is a
byword even with the uncritical Livy for shameless exaggeration and
mis-statement.[94]

But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer
shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world?
Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians?
Rain-making we can understand at Rome,--it had a practical end in view,
the procuring of rain for the crops,--but why lightning and thunder,
which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a
thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome
is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together,
and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include
thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I
entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman
ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and
practice;[95] there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories
must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they
came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a
pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we
must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the
Eastern magic.[96] The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do
with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of _aquaelicium_;
but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves in the Etruscan
lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,[97] they
perverted the