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Iuppiter might help at need in averting defeat and awarding victory, but it was with Mars that the general conduct of war rested. Hardly any god in the state-cult has his character so clearly marked, and we may regard Mars as a deity who, taking on new functions to suit the needs of the times, almost entirely lost the traces of his original nature.
Finally, towards the end of our period the Iuppiter of the Capitol emerges triumphant, as it were, from his struggle with his rivals and, with the new title of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, the 'best and greatest, that is, of all the Iuppiters takes his place as the supreme deity of the Roman state and the personification of the greatness and majesty of Rome itself.
'Men call Iuppiter greatest and best, says Cicero, 'because he makes us not just or temperate or wise, but sound and healthy and rich and wealthy. Still less, until we come to the moralists of the Empire, is there any sense of that immediate and personal relation of the individual to a higher being, which is really in religion, far more than commandments and ordinances, the mainspring and safeguard of morality: even the conception of the Genius, the 'nearest' perhaps of all unseen powers, had nothing of this feeling in it, and it may be significant that, just because of his nearness to man, the Genius never quite attained to god-head.
So again, in all probability, the termini or boundary-stones between properties are in origin the objects though later only the site of a yearly ritual at the festival of the Terminalia on February the 23rd, and they are, as it were, summed up in 'the god Terminus, the great sacred boundary-stone, which had its own shrine within the Capitoline temple, because, according to the legend, 'the god' refused to budge even to make room for Iuppiter.
The fetial, who on that occasion represented the Roman people, at the solemn moment of the oath-taking, struck the sacrificial pig with the silex, saying as he did so, 'Do thou, Diespiter, strike the Roman people as I strike this pig here to-day, and strike them the more, as thou art greater and stronger. Here no doubt the underlying notion is not merely symbolical, but in origin the stone is itself the god, an idea which later religion expressed in the cult-title specially used in this connection, Iuppiter Lapis.
We may, therefore, suppose, on the analogy of what we have already seen to be the general lines of development in Roman religion, that the festivals in origin centred round a purpose rather than a personality, and were addressed 'to all spirits whom it might concern'; and that later, when the deus notion was on the increase, they either attached themselves to some god whose personality was already distinct, as the Vinalia were attached to Iuppiter, or 'developed' a deity of their own.
War is a new province of the state's activity, but, characteristically enough, it does not evolve its own numen, but enlarges the sphere of the somewhat elastic spirits already existing. So too in the internal organisation of the state there is felt the need of a religious sanction for public morality, and Iuppiter though vaguely at first takes on him the character of a deity of justice.
Now it was Fortuna who was worshipped at Praeneste, and not Jupiter. Although there is an intimate connection between Jupiter and Fortuna at Praeneste, because she was thought of at different times as now the mother and now the daughter of Jupiter, still the weight of evidence will not allow any such importance to be attached to Iuppiter puer as Delbrueck wishes.
The cave to the west is made by Delbrueck the shrine of Iuppiter puer, and the temple with its cave at the east, the aedes Fortunae. This he does on the authority of his understanding of the passage from Cicero which gives nearly all the written information we have on the subject of the temple. Delbrueck bases his entire argument on this passage and two other references to a building called aedes.
Afterwards, accompanied by his father and friends and clad now in the toga virilis, he went solemnly to the Capitol, and, after placing a contribution in the coffers of Iuventas or probably in earlier times of Iuppiter Iuventus made an offering to the supreme deity Iuppiter Capitolinus. The sacred character of the early years of a young Roman's life could hardly be more closely marked.
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