[Sidenote: The kings of Alba seem also to have claimed to represent Jupiter.] According to a tradition which we have no reason to reject, Rome was founded by settlers from Alba Longa, a city situated on the slope of the Alban hills, overlooking the lake and the Campagna.[571] Hence if the Roman kings claimed to be representatives or embodiments of Jupiter, the god of the sky, of the thunder, and of the oak, it is natural to suppose that the kings of Alba, from whom the founder of Rome traced his descent, may have set up the same claim before them. Now the Alban dynasty bore the name of Silvii or Wood, and it can hardly be without significance that in the vision of the historic glories of Rome revealed to Aeneas in the underworld, Virgil, an antiquary as well as a poet, should represent all the line of Silvii as crowned [Sidenote: The Silvii and the Julii.] with oak.[572] A chaplet of oak leaves would thus seem to have been part of the insignia of the old kings of Alba Longa as of their successors the kings of Rome; in both cases it marked the monarch as the human representative of the oak-god. With regard to Silvius, the first king of the Alban dynasty, we are told that he got his name because he had been born or brought up in the forest, and that when he came to man’s estate he contested the kingdom with his kinsman Julus, whose name, as some of the ancients themselves [Sidenote: Julus, the little Jupiter.] perceived, means the Little Jupiter. The people decided in favour of Silvius, but his rival Julus was consoled for the loss of the crown by being invested with religious authority and the office of chief pontiff, or perhaps rather of Flamen Dialis, the highest dignity after the kingship. From this Julus or Little Jupiter, the noble house of the Julii, and hence the first emperors of Rome, believed themselves to be sprung.[573] The legend of the dispute between Silvius and Julus may preserve a reminiscence of such a partition of spiritual and temporal powers in Alba Longa as afterwards took place in Rome, when the old regal office was divided between the Consuls and the King of the Sacred Rites.[574] Many more instances of such a schism will meet us later on. That the Julian house worshipped Vejovis, the Little Jupiter, according to the ancient rites of Alba Longa, is proved by the inscription on an altar which they dedicated to him at their ancestral home of Bovillae, a colony of Alba Longa, situated at the foot of the Alban hills.[575] The Caesars, the most illustrious family of the Julian house, took their name from their long hair (_caesaries_),[576] which was probably in those early days, as it was among the Franks long afterwards, a symbol of royalty.[577]