Now an investigator of the Roman religious system is here confronted with a difficult problem. Was this simply a Greek practice like that of the lectisternium, and one which began with the Etruscan dynasty and the foundation of the Capitoline temple with its triad of deities? Or is it possible that in the cult of the Roman Jupiter there was of old a common feast of some kind, shared by gods and worshippers, on which this gorgeous ritual was eventually grafted? Marquardt has gone so far as to separate the epulum Jovis altogether from the lectisternia, and apparently also from the inundation of Greek influence[945]. It answers rather, he says, to such domestic rites as the offering to Jupiter Dapalis described thus by Cato in the _De Re Rustica_[946]: ‘Dapem hoc modo fieri oportet. Iovi dapali culignam vini quantum vis polluceto. Eo die feriae bubus et bubulcis, et qui dapem facient. Cum pollucere oportebit, sic facies. Iupiter dapalis, quod tibi fieri oportet, in domo familia mea culignam vini dapi, eius rei ergo macte hac illace dape pollucenda esto. Manus interluito. Postea vinum sumito. Iupiter dapalis, macte istace dape pollucenda esto. Macte vino inferio esto. Vestae, si voles, dato[947]. Daps Iovi assaria pecuina, urna vini lovis caste.’ I confess that I do not see wherein lies the point of the comparison of this passage with the ceremony of the epulum; and Marquardt himself does not attempt to elaborate it. There is no mention here of a visible presence of Jupiter in the form of an image, which is the one striking feature of the epulum. Marquardt, as it seems to me, might better have adduced some example from old Italian usage of the _belief_ that the gods were spiritually present at a common religious meal—a belief on which might easily be engrafted the practice of presenting them there in actual iconic form. Ovid, for example, writes thus of the cult of the Sabine Vacuna[948]: Ante focos olim scamnis considere longis Mos erat, _et mensae credere adesse deos_. Nunc quoque cum fiunt antiquae sacra Vacunae, Ante Vacunales stantque sedentque focos. Or again in the sacra of the curiae, if Dionysius reports them rightly[949], we find a clear case of a common meal in which the gods took part. He tells us that he saw tables in the ‘sacred houses’ of the curiae spread for the gods with simple food in very primitive earthenware dishes. He does not mention the presence of any images of the gods, but it is probable from his interesting description that each curia partook with its gods of a common meal of a religious character, and one not likely to have come under Greek influence[950].