1. Italy presents us with no real parallel to this child-Jupiter though in Greece we find many. Jordan has mentioned three possible Italian parallels, but rejected them all: Caeculus Volcani, the legendary founder of Praeneste, Hercules bullatus, and the beardless Veiovis. The attributes of the last-named are explained by a late identification with Apollo[975]; Hercules bullatus is undoubtedly Greek: the story of the birth of Caeculus is a foundation-legend, truly Italian in character, but belonging to a different class of religious ideas from that we are discussing. To these we may add that the _boy-Mars_ found on a Praenestine cista is clearly of Etruscan origin, as is shown by Deecke in the _Lexicon_, s. v. Maris. 2. Cicero’s statement is not confirmed by any inscription from Praeneste. Those which were formerly thought to refer to _Iupiter Puer_[976] are now proved to belong to Fortuna as _Iovis puer_ (= _filia_). It is most singular that Fortuna should be thus styled _Iovis puer_ in the same place where Jupiter himself was worshipped as _puer_; still more so that in one inscription (2868) the cutter should have dropped out the ‘s’ in Iovis, so that we actually read _Iovi puero_. It may seem tempting to guess that the name Jupiter Puer arose from a misunderstanding of the word _puer_ as applied to Fortuna: but the evidence as it stands supplies no safe ground for this. 3. The fact that Cicero describes a statue is itself suspicious, in the absence of corroborative evidence of any other kind[977]: for it suggests that the cult may have arisen, and have taken its peculiar form, as a result of the introduction of Greek or Graeco-Etruscan works of art. In Praeneste itself, and in other parts of Latium and of Campania, innumerable terra-cottas have been found[978], of the type of the Greek κουροτρόφος, i. e. a mother, sitting or standing, with a child, and occasionally two children[979] in her lap. These may, indeed, be simply votive offerings, to Fortuna and other deities of childbirth: but such objects may quite well have served as the foundation from which the idea of Fortuna and her infants arose. There is a passage in Servius which seems to me to show a trace of a similar confusion elsewhere in this region of Italy. ‘Circa hunc tractum Campaniae colebatur _puer Iuppiter_ qui Anxyrus dicebatur quasi ἄνευ ξυροῦ, id est sine novacula: quia barbam nunquam rasisset: et _Iuno virgo_ quae Feronia dicebatur[980].’ True, the Jupiter of Anxur is a boy or youth[981], not an infant: but the passage serves well to show the fluidity of Italian deities, at any rate in regard to the names attached to them. That this _puer Iuppiter_ was originally some other deity, and very possibly a Greek one, I have little doubt: while Juno Virgo, Feronia, Fortuna, Proserpina, all seem to slide into each other in a way which is very bewildering to the investigator[982]. This is no doubt owing to two