particularly on the entrance-day of
the month which bears his name and is the beginning of the natural year
after the winter solstice. This is the best account to be had of the
original Janus,[252] a deity, let it be remembered, of a simple
agricultural and warlike people, without literature or philosophy. But
it is not difficult to see how, when philosophy and literature did at
last come in a second-hand form to this people, they might well have
overlaid with cobwebs of story and speculation a deity for whom they had
no longer any real use, who was best known to them by the mysterious
double-head on the _as_ and the gateway, and for whom they could find no
conclusive parallel among the gods of Greece.

Next in order of invocation to Janus came Jupiter, and his priest, the
Flamen Dialis, was likewise the second in rank, according to ancient
rule, after the _rex sacrorum_. Unlike Janus, Jupiter (to use the
spelling familiar in England) was at all times a great power for the
Roman people, and one who could be all the more valued because he was
intelligible. No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he was
the god of the light and of heaven, _Diovis pater_, or rather perhaps
the heaven itself[253] with all its manifestations of rain and thunder,
of blessing and damage to the works of man; the common inheritance of
the Italian peoples, dwelling and worshipped in their woods and on their
hills; and, as we know now, also the common inheritance of all Aryan
stocks, the "European Sky-god," as Mr. A. B. Cook has traced him with
learning and ingenuity from the Euxine to Britain.[254]

Jupiter must have had a long and important history in Latium before the
era of the Roman City-state; Dr. Frazer has seen this, and set it forth
in his lectures on the early history of the kingship, though basing his
conclusions on evidence much of which will not bear a close
examination.[255] The one substantial proof of it lies in the unique and
truly extraordinary character of the taboos placed on his flamen, and to
some extent on the flamen's wife, by the Roman _ius divinum_. Even if we
suppose that some of these may have been later inventions of an
ecclesiastical college like the pontifices (and this is hardly
probable), many of them are obviously of remote antiquity, and can only
have originated at a time when the magical power of the man responsible
for the conduct of Jupiter was so precious that it had to be safeguarded
in these many