[Sidenote: The Vestal fire and the great priesthoods appear to have been institutions common to the whole Latin race.] Thus it appears that a variety of considerations combined to uphold, if not to originate, the custom of maintaining a perpetual fire. The sanctity of the wood which fed it, the belief in the generative virtue of the process by which it was kindled, the supposed efficacy of fire in repelling the powers of evil, the association of the hearth with the spirits of the dead and with the majesty or even the life of the king all worked together to invest the simple old custom with a halo of mystery and romance. If this was so at Rome we may assume that matters were not very different in the other Latin towns which kept up a Vestal fire. These too had their kings of the Sacred Rites, their flamens, and their pontiffs, as well as their Vestal Virgins.[866] All the great priesthoods of Rome appear, in fact, to have had their doubles in the other ancient cities of Latium; all were probably primitive institutions common to the whole Latin race.[867] [Sidenote: Priestly or divine functions of the Roman kings, including the maintenance of the Vestal fire.] Accordingly, whatever is true or probable of the Roman priesthoods, about which we know most, may reasonably be regarded as true or probable of the corresponding priesthoods elsewhere in Latium, about which for the most part we know nothing more than the names. Now in regard to the Roman king, whose priestly functions were inherited by his successor the king of the Sacred Rites, the foregoing discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented and indeed personated Jupiter, the great god of the oak, the sky, and the thunder, and in that character made rain, thunder, and lightning for the good of his subjects, like many more kings of the weather in other parts of the world. Further, he not only mimicked the oak-god by wearing an oak wreath and other insignia of divinity, but he was married to an oak-nymph Egeria, who appears to have been merely a local form of Diana in her character of a goddess of woods, of waters, and of childbirth. Moreover, he was descended from the oak, since he was born of a virgin who conceived by contact with a fire of sacred oak-wood. Hence he had to guard the ancestral fire and keep it constantly burning, inasmuch as on its maintenance depended the continuance of the royal family. Only on certain stated occasions was it lawful and even necessary to extinguish the old fire in order to revive it in a purer and more vigorous form by the friction of the sacred wood. This was done once a year on the first of March,[868] and we may conjecture that it was also done by the new king on his accession to power; for, as we have seen, it has been customary in [Sidenote: But the fire was formally extinguished and rekindled on certain occasions, perhaps on the death of the king.] various places to extinguish the