At the sight the poet starts: “Is this, quoth I, the house of Jove? For sure to my prophetic soul the oaken crown was reason good to think it so.”[561] The senate had granted Augustus the right to have the wreath of oak always suspended over his door;[562] and elsewhere Ovid counts this among the more than mortal honours bestowed on the emperor.[563] On the Capitol at Cirta there stood a silver image of Jupiter wearing a silver crown of oak leaves and acorns.[564] Similarly at Dodona, the most famous sanctuary of the oak in Greece, the image of Zeus appears to have worn a chaplet of oak leaves; for the god is constantly thus portrayed on coins of Epirus.[565] And just as Roman kings appear to have personated the oak-god Jupiter, so Greek kings appear to have personated the oak-god Zeus. The legendary Salmoneus of Elis is certainly reported to have done so;[566] Periphas, an ancient king of Athens, is said to have been styled Zeus by his people, and to have been changed into an eagle by his jealous name-sake.[567] In Homer kings are often spoken of as nurtured by Zeus and divine.[568] Indeed we are told that in ancient days every Greek king was called Zeus.[569] [Sidenote: To the Romans the breach between the human and the divine was not so wide as it seems to us.] Thus we may fairly assume that on certain solemn occasions Roman generals and magistrates personated the supreme god, and that in so doing they revived the practice of the early kings. To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and the divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonisation of a saint seems to a modern Catholic. The Romans in particular were quite familiar with the spectacle of men masquerading as spirits; for at the funerals of great houses all the illustrious dead of the family were personated by men specially chosen for their resemblance to the departed. These representatives wore [Sidenote: Roman custom of representing dead ancestors by masked men.] masks fashioned and painted in the likeness of the originals: they were dressed in rich robes of office, resplendent with purple and gold, such as the dead nobles had worn in their lifetime: like them, they rode in chariots through the city preceded by the rods and axes, and attended by all the pomp and heraldry of high station; and when at last the funeral procession, after threading its way through the crowded streets, defiled into the Forum, the maskers solemnly took their seats on ivory chairs placed for them on the platform of the Rostra, in the sight of the people, recalling no doubt to the old, by their silent presence, the memories of an illustrious past, and firing the young with the ambition of a glorious future.[570]