But how did these writers come by such legends, which, as Dr. Frazer shows, are to be found also in Greece and in other parts of the world? Why should they have wished to make Roman kings into magicians? Rain-making we can understand at Rome,--it had a practical end in view, the procuring of rain for the crops,--but why lightning and thunder, which were so much dreaded that every bit of damage done by a thunderstorm had to be carefully expiated by a religious process? Rome is not in the tropics, where rain and thunder so often come together, and where an attempt to produce rain by magic might naturally include thunder, as in some of Dr. Frazer's examples from tropical lands. I entirely agree with the latest and most sober investigators of Roman ritual that this kind of magic is quite foreign to Roman ideas and practice;[95] there is no vestige of it in the Roman cult; these stories must have come from outside. And there is every probability that they came from Etruria, where the lore of lightning had become a pseudo-science, a waste of human ingenuity, for the origin of which we must look, as we are now beginning to understand, to Babylonia and the Eastern magic.[96] The Jupiter Elicius of the Aventine had nothing to do with lightning; he took his cult-title from the rite of _aquaelicium_; but as soon as the Romans began to interest themselves in the Etruscan lightning-lore, of which this electrical magic was only a part,[97] they perverted the meaning of the epithet to suit their new studies, and began to attribute to their legendary kings powers which properly belonged to Etruscan or Oriental magicians. The second century B.C., when Piso wrote his _Annals_, is exactly the period when we should naturally expect such studies to come into fashion, and with such perversions of "history" as their consequence.[98]