other sepultures the bones of several young children deposited in rudely hollowed trunks of oak.[609] With all this evidence before us we need not wonder that Virgil should speak of the primitive inhabitants of Rome as “born of the tree-trunks and the heart of oak,” and that the Roman kings should have worn crowns of oak leaves in imitation of the oak-god Jupiter, who dwelt in his sacred grove on the Capitol. [Sidenote: The Alban kings may have imitated Latian Jupiter, who dwelt on the top of the Alban Mount.] If the kings of Rome aped Capitoline Jove, their predecessors the kings of Alba probably laid themselves out to mimic the great Latian Jupiter, who had his seat above the city on the summit of the Alban Mountain. Latinus, the legendary ancestor of the dynasty, was said to have been changed into Latian Jupiter after vanishing from the world in the mysterious fashion characteristic of the old Latin kings.[610] The sanctuary of the god on the top of the mountain was the religious centre of the Latin League, as Alba was its political capital till Rome wrested the supremacy from its ancient rival. Apparently no temple, in our sense of the word, was ever erected to Jupiter on this his holy mountain; as god of the sky and thunder he appropriately received the homage of his worshippers in the open air. The massive wall, of which some remains still enclose the old garden of the Passionist monastery, seems to have been part of the sacred precinct which Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, marked out for the solemn annual assembly of the Latin League.[611] The god’s oldest sanctuary on this airy mountain-top was a grove;[612] and bearing in mind not merely the special consecration of the oak to Jupiter, but also the traditional oak crown of the Alban kings and the analogy of the Capitoline Jupiter at Rome, we may suppose that the trees in the grove were oaks.[613] We know that in antiquity Mount Algidus, an outlying group of the Alban hills, was covered with dark forests of oak;[614] and among the tribes who belonged to the Latin League in the earliest days, and were entitled to share the flesh of the white bull sacrificed on the Alban Mount, there was one whose members styled themselves the Men of the Oak,[615] doubtless on account of the woods among which they dwelt.