This last example may suggest a hypothesis which is at least not likely to do any serious harm. Let it be remembered that each curia was a constituent part of the whole Roman community. We might naturally expect to find a common religious meal of the same kind in which the _whole_ state took part through its magistrates and senate. This is just what we do find in the epulum Jovis, though the character of its ceremonial is different; and it is certainly possible that this epulum had its origin in a feast like that which Dionysius saw, but one which afterwards underwent vital changes at the hands of the Etruscan dynasty of Roman kings. I am strongly inclined to believe that it was under the influence of these kings that the meal came to take place on the Capitol, and in the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which they intended to be the new centre of the Roman dominion[951]; and to them also I would ascribe the presence at the feast of the three deities in iconic form. It may be that before that critical era in Roman history the epulum took place not on the Capitol but in the Regia, which with the temple of Vesta hard by formed the oldest centre of the united Rome; and that the presence of Jupiter[952] or any other god was there a matter of belief, like that of Vacuna with the Sabines, and not of the actual evidence of eyesight. But this conjecture is a somewhat bold one; and it seems worth while to take this opportunity of examining more closely into the cult of Jupiter, with the object of determining whether the great god was apt, in any part of Italy but Etruria, to lend himself easily to anthropomorphic ideas and practices[953]. The cult of Jupiter is found throughout Italy under several forms of the same name, with or without the suffix -piter = pater, which, so far as we can guess, points to a conception of the god as protector, if not originator, of a stock. This paternal title, which was applied to other deities also, does not necessarily imply an early advance beyond the ‘daemonistic’ conception of divine beings; it rather suggests that some one such being had been brought into peculiarly close relations with a particular stock, and does no more than indicate a possibility of further individual development in the future[954]. The ‘father’ in this case has no wife, though we find the word ‘mater’ applied to goddesses[955]; Juno is undoubtedly the female principle, but she is not, as has so often been imagined, the wife of Jupiter. The attempt to prove this by arguing from the Flamen Dialis and his wife the Flaminica cannot succeed: the former was the priest of Jupiter, but his wife was not the priestess of Juno[956]. There is indeed a certain mysterious dualism of male and female among the old Italian divinities, as we know from the _locus classicus_ in Gellius (_N. A._ 13. 23. 2); but we are not entitled to say that the relation was a conjugal one[957].