painfully taken of him.[217] The priest of Jupiter and his
taboos carry us back, beyond a doubt, into the far-away dim history of
primitive Latium. By the time the eternal city was founded on the Tiber,
he must have been already practically obsolete. My suggestion is that he
is the representative in the Roman religious system of another and more
primitive system which existed in Latium, probably at Alba, where
Jupiter was worshipped on the mountain from time immemorial. When the
strength of Latium was concentrated at the best strategical point on the
Tiber, the priest of Jupiter was transferred to the new city, because he
was too "precious" to be left behind, though even then a relic of
antiquity. There he became what he was throughout Roman history, a
practically useless personage, about whom certain sacred traditions had
gathered, but placed in complete subjection to the new legal and
religious king, and afterwards to the Pontifex maximus.[218]

If there be any truth in this--and I believe it to be a legitimate
inference from the legal position of this Flamen, and his permanent
state of taboo--then I think we may see a great religious change in the
era of the "calendar of Numa." Inspired with new ideas of the duty and
destiny of the new city of the four regions, a priest-king, doubtless
with the help and advice of a council, according to the true Roman
fashion, put an end for ever to the reign of the old magician-kingship,
but preserved the magician-king as a being still capable of
wonder-working in the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced
magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of
legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually
destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an age of barbarism.

NOTES TO LECTURE V.

[185] Kornemann, _op. cit._ p. 87; Wissowa, _Gesammelte
Abhandlungen_, p. 230 foll.; Mommsen, _Staatsrecht_,
iii. p. 790, note 1. For the festival of the
Septimontium, Varro, _L.L._ vi. 24; Plutarch, _Quaest.
Rom._ 69; Fowler, _R.F._ p. 265 foll. This festival does
not appear in the calendar, as not being "feriae populi,
sed montanorum modo" (Varro, _l.c._). There are some
interesting remarks on the relation between agricultural
life and the origin of towns in von Jhering's _Evolution
of the Aryan_ (Eng. trans.), p. 86 foll., with special
reference to Rome.

[186] Von Duhn in _J.H.S._ xvi. 126 f