Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/364

 3i6 The European Sky -God.

philosophy or religion, concluded that Jupiter was tain homincm guam ex homine, "a man and the son of a man."

Now the early Greek king, in his office as human Zeus, controlled the sun, the rain, and the crops. The same is true of his Italian counterpart. Every year on the 2ist of April the Romans celebrated the festival of the Parilia,^ at which they leaped over bonfires probably as a charm to procure sunshine.^ The day was regarded as the birthday of Rome itself, and it was said that Romulus had offered the original sacrifice and arranged the details of the ritual.^ Mr. VVarde Fowler'^ infers that the sacrificing priest at the urban Parilia was the rex sacronim, a religious representative of the old Roman king. Certainly it was he who on the kalends of each month, as soon as the new moon was observed in the sky, offered a sacrifice to Juno and summoned the people to the Curia Calabra adjoining the hut of Romulus on the Capitol in order to announce to them when the nones would fall due.^ He thus appears to have furnished the people with both sunshine and moonshine. The ruins of his house, the Regia, show in the centre of the main apartment a circular base of grey tufa,^ which may have been the royal hearth. And close to the Regia stood the temple of Vesta, where the Vestal virgins watched their undying flame. The perpetual fire thus maintained under the eye of the king was, if I am right,^ simply a means of keeping up the sun's heat by mimetic magic. The human Jupiter was responsible for the sunlight. When Romulus vanished, the sun was

^ W. Warde Fowler The Roman Festivals p. 79 ff.
 * W. Mannhardt Wald- und FeldkuUe -p- 517.

^Dionys. atU. Horn. i. 88. *W. Warde Fowler op. cit. p. S3, n. i.

^Macrob. Sat. i. 15. 9 ff.

facing pp. 53 and 56, Ch. Hiilsen Das Forum Rojnanum p. 154, fig. 76. "See Folk- Lore xv. 30S ff., Class. Rev. xviii. 366.
 * • E. Burton-Brown Recent Excavs. in the Roman Forum p. 53 with pis.