However, according to some very respectable authorities the wife of Saturn was not Lua, but Ops,(596) so that we have two independent lines of proof that Saturn was supposed to be married. Lastly, the epithets “father” and “mother” which the Romans bestowed on many of their deities(597) are most naturally understood to imply paternity and maternity; and if the implication is admitted, the inference appears to be inevitable that these divine beings were supposed to exercise sexual functions, whether in lawful marriage or in unlawful concubinage. As to Jupiter in particular his paternity is positively attested by Latin inscriptions, one of them very old, which describe Fortuna Primigenia, the great goddess of Praeneste, as his daughter.(598) Again, the rustic deity Faunus, one of the oldest and most popular gods of Italy,(599) was represented by tradition in the character of a husband and a father; one of the epithets applied to him expressed in a coarse way his generative powers.(600) Fauna or the Good Goddess (_Bona Dea_), another of the oldest native Italian deities, was variously called his wife or his daughter, and he is said to have assumed the form of a snake in order to cohabit with her.(601) Again, the most famous of all Roman myths represented the founder of Rome himself, Romulus and his twin brother Remus, as begotten by the god Mars on a Vestal Virgin;(602) and every Roman who accepted the tradition thereby acknowledged the fatherhood of the god in the physical, not in a figurative, sense of the word. If the story of the birth of Romulus and Remus should be dismissed as a late product of the mythical fancy working under Greek influence, the same objection can hardly be urged against the story of the birth of another Roman king, Servius Tullius, who is said to have been a son of the fire-god and a slave woman; his mother conceived him beside the royal hearth, where she was impregnated by a flame that shot out from the fire in the shape of the male organ of generation.(603) It would scarcely be possible to express the physical fatherhood of the fire-god in more unambiguous terms. Now a precisely similar story was told of the birth of Romulus himself;(604) and we may suspect that this was an older form of the story than the legend which fathered the twins on Mars. Similarly, Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, passed for a son of the fire-god Vulcan. It was said that his mother was impregnated by a spark which leaped from the fire and struck her as she sat by the hearth. In later life, when Caeculus boasted of his divine parentage to a crowd, and they refused to believe him, he prayed to his father to give the unbelievers a sign, and straightway a lambent flame surrounded the whole multitude. The proof was conclusive, and henceforth Caeculus passed for a true son of the fire-god.(605) Such tales of kings or heroes begotten by the fire-god on mortal women appear to be genuine old Italian myths, which may well go