But it must be confessed that the evidence is very slight[1013]: and it is as well here to remember that the further we probe back into old Italian rites, the less distinctly can we expect to be able to connect them with particular deities. The formula ‘si deus, si dea es’ should always be borne in mind in attempting to connect gods and ceremonies. And this ceremony, like that of the Argei[1014] (which also wants a clearly-conceived deity as its object), is obviously a survival from a very primitive class of performances which Mr. Frazer has called acts of ‘sympathetic magic[1015].’ I am indebted to the _Golden Bough_ for a striking parallel to the rite of the lapis manalis, among many others which more or less resemble it. ‘In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god: and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a stream[1016].’ What was done with the lapis manalis we are not told, but it is pretty plain from the word ‘manalis,’ and from the fragments of explanation which have come down to us from Roman scholars, that it was either the object of some splashing or pouring, or was itself hollow and was filled with water which was to be poured out in imitation of the desired rain[1017]. Such rites need not necessarily be connected by us with the name of a god: and the Jupiter Elicius, with whom it is sought to connect this one, was always associated by the Romans not with this obsolete rite, but with the elaborated science of augury which was in the main Etruscan[1018].
But this discussion has already been carried on as far as the scope of this work permits. It may be completed by any one who has the patience to work through Aust’s exhaustive article, examining his conclusions with the aid of his abundant references; but I doubt if anything will be found, beyond what I have mentioned, which bears closely on the question with which we set out. That question was, whether the distinctly anthropomorphic treatment of Jupiter in the ‘epulum Iovis’ could be explained by any native Italian practice in his cult (as Marquardt tried to explain it), or must be referred with Aust to foreign, i. e. Graeco-Etruscan, influence. I am driven to the conclusion that Aust is probably right. There is no real trace in Italy of an indigenous iconic representation of Jupiter. Trees and hills are apparently sacred to him, and possibly stones, though this last is doubtful: we find a sacrificial meal at the Latin festival, but no sign that he takes part in it as an image or statue. Elsewhere, as at Praeneste, peculiar representations of him arouse strong suspicions of foreign iconic influence. I think, on the whole, that the Italian peoples owed the sacred image to foreign works of art: and that the ‘epulum Iovis’ was introduced from Etruria by the Etruscan dynasty which built the Capitoline temple. It may, indeed, have been engrafted upon an earlier sacrificial meal like that of the feriae Latinae, or that of the curiae, or the rustic one of Jupiter dapalis: but, if so, the meal was one at which the ancient Romans were content to _believe_, as Ovid says, that the gods were present, and did not need, like the Greeks, the evidence of their eyes to help out their belief. Their gods were still aniconic when the wave of foreign ideas broke over them. We may say of the earliest Roman cult of Jupiter what Tacitus asserts of the Germans of his day[1019]: ‘nec cohibere parietibus deos neque in ullam humani oris speciem adsimulare ex magnitudine caelestium arbitrantur: lucos ac nemora consecrant, deorumque nominibus appellant secretum illud quod sola reverentia vident.’