William Mitchell Ramsay and William Warde Fowler

“ In this oldest Jupiter of the Latins and Romans, the god of the light and the heaven, and the god invoked in taking the most solemn oaths, we may undoubtedly see not only the great protecting deity of the race, but one, and perhaps the only one, whose worship embodies a distinct moral conception. ”

“ The lesser deities, Dius Fidius and Fides, were probably originally identical with him, and only gained a separate existence in course of time by a process familiar to students of ancient religion. This connexion with the conscience, with the sense of obligation and right dealing, was never quite lost throughout Roman history. In Virgil’s great poem, though Jupiter is in many ways as much Greek as Roman, he is still the great protecting deity who keeps the hero in the path of duty (pietas) towards gods, state and family. ”

“ His worship spread over the whole empire; it is probable that every city had its temple to the three deities of the Roman Capitol, and the fact that the Romans chose the name of Jupiter in almost every case, by which to indicate the chief deity of the subject peoples, proves that they continued to regard him, so long as his worship existed at all, as the god whom they themselves looked upon as greatest. ”