Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/328

 2 8o The European Sky-God.

centres of Jupiter-worship were marked by a sacred oak or a grove of sacred oaks. I have collected the available evidence of this practice in the Classical Review for October 1904;^ and I shall here confine myself to citing a few typical cases of it. The earliest temple at Rome w^as that which Romulus himself planned for Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, where grew " an oak held sacred by the shepherds." ^ Vediovis, the chthonian Jupiter worshipped in the dip of the same hill, appears on coins of the Fonteii, Gargilii, and Ogulnii wearing a wreath, of oak.^ Juno too, whose temple stood on the adjoining Arx, like Jupiter, had the oak as her sacred crown.* On the Caelian, which in ancient times was covered with oak-woods and known as the Mons Querquetulanus,^ there was a Sacred Tree,^ presum.ably the tree of Jupiter Caelius who is represented on a bas-relief as sl:^,nding beside his oak-tree.'^ Tibur worshipped Jupiter under the titles Gustos, Praestes, Territor,^ and pointed to a clump of three ancient oaks as the spot where its eponym Tiburnus or Tiburtus had been inaugurated.^ At Praeneste, where oaks were so abundant that Servius^*^ derives the name of the town from them (Trpri/o?!), Fortuna Primigenia^^ had an oracular shrine close to the temple of Jupiter Arcanus : ^- the famous sortes Praenestinae were graven in

Aen. 4. 445 f. ipsa {sc. quercus) haeret scopulis, et, quantum verdce ad auras | aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit. Another possible remini- scence of the Yggdrasill-tree occurs in connexion with Jupiter Tigillus, i.e. Jupiter "the Beam," who, according to Aug. de civ. Dei 7. 11, was so called "quod tamquam tigillus mundum contineret ac sustineret."

^ Class. Rev. xviii. 360 ff. - Li v. i. 10. 5.

' Babelon nionn. de la Rep. i. 507, 532, ii. 266.


 * Plut. quaestt. Rom. 92. •'' Tac. ami. 4. 65.

^ Notitia Regionum Regio ii. Caelemontium : continet. . . arborem sanctam.

'' Dessau 3080. ^ Corp. inscrr. Lat. xiv. 3557, Dessau 3401, 3028.

^ Plin. nat. hist. 16. 237. i" Serv. in Verg. Aett. 7. 678.

"Dessau 3684-3686.

^'- Corp. inscrr. Lat. xiv. 2937, 2972; op. R. Peter in Roscher Lex \. 1541,. 59 ff-