If we look at her in this light, there is really no difficulty in understanding why what seems to us at first sight a very vague conception, ‘the goddess who brings,’ should not have meant something very real and concrete to the early Italian mind. And again, if that be so, if Fortuna be once recognized as a great power in ways which touched these essential and practical needs of human nature, we may feel less astonishment at finding her represented either as the daughter or the mother of Jupiter. Such representation could indeed hardly have been the work of really primitive Italians; it arose, one may conjecture, if not from some confusion which we cannot now unravel, from the fame of the oracle—one of the very few in Italy—and the consequent fame of the goddess whose name came to be attached to that oracle. Or, as Jordan seems to think, it may have been the vicinity of the rock-oracle to the temple of Jupiter which gave rise to the connexion between the two in popular belief; a belief which was expressed in terms of relationship, perhaps under Greek influence, but certainly in a manner for the most part absent from the unmythological Italian religion. Why indeed in the same place she should be mother as well as daughter of Jupiter (if Cicero be accurate in his account, which is perhaps not quite certain) may well puzzle us all. Those who cannot do without an explanation may accept that of Prof. Max Müller, if they can also accept his etymology. Those who have acquired what Mommsen has called the ‘difficillima ars nesciendi,’ will be content with Jordan’s cautious remark, ‘Non desunt vestigia divinum numen Italis notum fuisse deis deabusve omnibus et hoc ipso in quo vivimus mundo antiquius[690].’ But Fortuna has not only been conjectured to be a deity of the dawn; she has been made out to be both a moon-goddess and a sun-goddess. For her origin in the moon there is really nothing of any weight to be urged; the advocate of this view is one of the least judicious of German specialists, and his arguments need not detain us[691]. But for her connexion with the sun there is something more to be said.