Jupiter

Jupiter is the king of the Roman gods and the only member of the pantheon whose name is a sentence: Iuppiter comes from the archaic vocative Iou-pater, "Sky Father", so that to name him was already to call upon him. The root is the same that yields the Greek Zeus and the Vedic Dyaus Pita, and it is the oldest thing about him that survives. What does not survive is a story. The Jupiter of the Latins was a god of the daytime sky, of the oath and of sovereignty, with no birth, no childhood and no genealogy: the pontiffs invoked him, they did not narrate him. The tale told about him today (Saturn devouring his children, the secret upbringing in Crete, the cosmos divided by lot with Neptune and Pluto) is Greek material grafted on from the third century BC, when Latin epic and tragedy began translating Zeus. The Roman Saturn who existed before that graft devoured nobody: he was the god of the Golden Age who reigned peacefully over Latium and in whose honour the Saturnalia were held.

Jupiter is the god of the sky, of lightning and of thunder, and he presides over law, oaths and the order of the Roman State. He is the divine witness of pacts, and the consuls swore in his name. His attributes are the thunderbolt, the eagle, the sceptre and the oak, the tree consecrated to him. His wife and sister is Juno, queen of the gods. The list of children usually given him must be read with care, because it is traced from that of Zeus and Rome did not always agree. His beyond dispute are Mercury (by Maia), Bacchus (by Semele), Apollo and Diana (by Latona), Proserpina (by Ceres) and Hercules (by the mortal Alcmena); and Minerva sprang armed from his head, with no mother. But Mars is not his son in the properly Roman version. Ovid's Fasti, which is a source of this very entry, tells how Juno grieved that Minerva had been born without a mother and asked Flora for help; Flora gave her a flower from the Olenian fields, and at a single touch Juno conceived. So Mars was born, fatherless and out of spite. Something similar has been said of Vulcan since Hesiod. The two sons Rome held most its own are precisely the ones their mother had alone.

In the official cult, Jupiter presided over the Capitoline Triad together with Juno and Minerva, worshipped in the great temple on the Capitol. He bore the title of Best and Greatest, and under other epithets he was invoked as the Thunderer, as Feretrius (to whom the spoils of the defeated enemy were offered) and as Stator (he who halts flight and steadies the army). His will was read through the auspices: the augurs were the only official interpreters of his signs, and the legitimacy of public decisions depended on them. For a Roman the god and his temple were very nearly the same thing, which is why it matters that the temple burned three times: in 83 BC, during Sulla's civil war; in AD 69, when Vitellius's troops set fire to the Capitol with the Flavians inside; and again in 80, under Titus. Each time it was rebuilt on the same foundations, because to move the temple would have been to move the god. The cult statue of the earliest period was neither marble nor gold: it was terracotta, the work of the Etruscan sculptor Vulca of Veii.

In Virgil's Aeneid, Jupiter guarantees the destiny of Aeneas and steers the founding of Rome, promising the Romans an empire without end. Even there his role is peculiar: he does not decide, he executes. In book X he declares that he is the same king to all and that the fates will find their way; he guarantees them without being able to bend them. In the Gigantomachy he defeats, together with the other gods, the Giants who storm heaven, and Ovid tells how he struck down the impiety of Lycaon and unleashed the flood to punish a corrupted humankind. Both episodes are Greek in origin and reached Rome with poetry, just as his childhood did. What is entirely his own is what remained once the temples closed: the weekday that bears his name, dies Iovis, still alive in the Spanish jueves, the French jeudi and the Italian giovedì; the largest planet of the solar system; and a Roman legal formula, sworn good faith, which passed into European civil law without his name but with his function.

Before he had a face, Jupiter had a stone. In the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, which Livy holds to be the first ever raised in Rome, a flint was kept, and with it the fetials sealed treaties: the priests charged with declaring war and concluding peace. The rite is described in full in Livy (I, 24). The priest called the pater patratus recited the terms of the treaty and added the conditional curse: if the Roman people should be the first to break its word, then Jupiter was to strike it on that day as he himself was about to strike the pig, and all the more heavily as he was the greater in power and might. And having said this, he struck the animal with the flint. From that comes a formula the Romans used when swearing, which translates literally as "to swear by Jupiter Stone". It is neither a metaphor nor a slip of the language. In the oldest layer of Latin cult the god of the oath was in the falling flint just as he was in the lightning, because lightning was understood as the stone the sky throws. A god whose weapon and whose testimony are one and the same thing.

On the day of his triumph, the victorious general rode up to the Capitol in the god's own four-horse chariot, wearing the palm-embroidered tunic and the painted toga that were kept in the temple, and with his face painted red. Pliny the Elder records it while treating of minium, the vermilion obtained from cinnabar: on festival days the face of the statue of Jupiter was smeared with minium, and so were the bodies of those celebrating a triumph. The terracotta statue was red, and the man took on the colour of the statue. The Romans left no explanation of what exactly this meant, and moderns still argue whether the triumphator was the god for a day or merely wore his clothes. What is not argued is the detail that went with the scene: behind the chariot walked a public slave holding above the general's head the heavy golden crown, too large to be worn. That he also whispered in his ear a reminder that he was mortal is told by late and Christian authors, and is best taken for what it is, a later moralising addition, not a documented Republican ceremony.

The god of the open sky had as his chief priest the least free man in Rome. Aulus Gellius devotes a whole chapter of the Attic Nights (X, 15) to the prohibitions binding the flamen Dialis, and the list is astonishing: he could not ride a horse, nor look upon an army drawn up under arms, nor swear an oath; he could not wear a knot in his clothing, nor a ring unless it were hollow and broken; his cap was not removed indoors; he could not touch a goat, nor raw meat, nor ivy, nor beans, nor even name them. He could not spend a single night outside Rome. If anyone in chains entered his house, the man had to be released, and the chains were taken out through the roof. His wife, the flaminica, was a priestess along with him and could not be divorced: if she died, he laid down the office. The priesthood stood vacant for seventy-five years, from 87 to 11 BC, because nobody would take it, and a substitute had to be appointed for the sacrifices. It is the best proof that the cult of Jupiter was not a devotion but a public office: the priest of the god who guaranteed Rome's sworn word was forbidden to swear, and the man who served the god of sovereignty was not master even of his own clothes.