sition than even the Jupiter Latiaris
of the Mons Albanus, whose temple had been rebuilt in the same period.
The very novelty of such cult-titles betrays both power and genius in
their originator; they are wholly unlike any we have met with so far;
they do not suggest a function or a locality or a connection with some
other deity; they stand absolutely alone in the history of the Roman
religion till far on in the Empire.[500] Here is no _numen_ needed at a
particular season to bless some agricultural operation; Jupiter Optimus
Maximus seems hardly to be limited by space or season, and is to be
always there looking down on his people from his seat on the hill which
was henceforward to be called Capitolinus, because the space which had
been prepared there for his reception bore the name of Capitolium, the
place of headship.[501] These titles, Best and Greatest, call for
reflection, for more thought than we are apt to give them; one wonders
whether they can be as old as tradition claimed, and in fact at least
one recent writer has been tempted, without sufficient reason, to date
the whole foundation two centuries later than the Tarquinii.[502] To me
they rather suggest the hypothesis that the break-up of the Etruscan
domination in Rome was the work of a man or men inspired by a new
national feeling which ascribed the revolution to the great god of the
race, to whose shrine on the same hill the kings had been used to bring
the spoils of their enemies[503]; and that they took advantage of the
uncompleted Etruscan temple, with its huge foundations and underground
_favissae_, to settle there a new Jupiter, better and greater than any
other, to whom his people would be for ever grateful, and in whom they
would for ever put their trust. All older associations with cults of the
Heaven-god were to be banished from the Capitolium, just as all other
deities were believed to have fled from the spot, save only Terminus;
the ancient priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Dialis, had no special
connection with this temple and its cult, which were under the immediate
charge of an _aedituus_ only.[504] Here was the centre of the public
worship of the State as a whole, not only of the old patrician State;
and no such ancient curiosity as the Flamen Dialis, who, as I have
suggested, was a survival from some older era of Latin religious
history, was to be supreme there. Here the Consul of the free Republic
was to offer, on entering office, the victim--