Temple of Jupiter

“ Zeus, as we have seen, often condescends to visit mankind, either as a mortal, or under various disguises, whereas Jupiter always remains essentially the supreme god of heaven, and never appears upon earth.
The most celebrated temple of Jupiter was that on the Capitoline Hill in the city of Rome, where he was worshipped under the names of Jupiter-Optimus-Maximus, Capitolinus, and Tarpeius.
The Romans represented him seated on a throne of ivory, holding in his right hand a sheaf of thunderbolts, and in his left a sceptre, whilst an eagle stands beside his throne. ”

“ At one end of the forum is a high stone platform and wide stone steps leading up to a row of broken columns in front of a fallen wall. This is the ruin of the temple of Jupiter, the great Roman god. Daily, men used to come here to pray before a statue in a dim room. Here, in the ruins, the excavators found the head of that statue—a beautiful marble thing with long curling hair and beard, and calm face. ”

“ In each of these cities we probably see the remains of some of the finest examples. Judging from the fragments found at Rome, we may pronounce that there were many other buildings of great beauty, but none which we could wish to exchange for the temple of Mars Ultor, of Jupiter Stator, of Jupiter Tonans, of Antoninus and Faustina, or for the portico of the Pantheon. The temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was indeed larger than any of these, but we may doubt if its architecture were better, or even so good. ”

“ Ruins at Agrigentum—Temple of Juno most picturesque, of Concord very perfect—three others, last the grand Temple of Olympian Jupiter, one of the most stupendous buildings of the ancient world, and whose buried materials swell into hills or subside in valleys, over which we have ourselves wandered, without at first knowing that we trode upon the prostrate labours of man, and not the workings of nature. ”

“ The fact of the inclusion of his statue in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; the hole cut in the temple roof so that he might be worshipped in the open air as being, like Jupiter, a god of the sky; and the later assumption of a Jupiter Terminus or Terminalis (cf. the Greek Ζεὺς ὅριος) support this view. ”

“ In the fabric of these walls the early builders had incorporated the remains of the still earlier temple of Jupiter, which had been destroyed to give place to the Christian church, and among the débris were found the fragments of an altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the Nautæ, a guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, an altar on whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. ”

“ Of the temples, one of them was dedicated to Æsculapius; the ascent to which was by a stair of fifteen steps, and it received no light but from the door. Beneath it are vaults of great strength; its roof is an arch adorned with sunk pannels of beautiful workmanship, and its walls are of a remarkable thickness. This temple remains almost entire.
There is another temple, dedicated to Jupiter, who was worshipped by Diocletian with peculiar veneration; and in honour of whom he assumed the name of Jovius. This temple is surrounded with one row of columns, having a space between them and the wall. ”

“ It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. ”

“ The world-famous statue of Jupiter was the work of the great sculptor Phidias. It measured 43 feet in height above the base. The body of the god was carved from ivory, and the drapery was of solid gold. No other statue of such magnitude, of such artistic perfection, or of such precious material, has been known to history. Among the ruins of the temple are still to be seen the remains of the black marble mosaic on which the statue stood. ”

“ The cella, now ruinous, had inner wall-reliefs and engaged columns, which supported rich entablatures.
The vaults below the Great Court of the Jupiter Temple, together with the supporting walls of the terrace, are noticeable. In the W. wall of the latter occur the three famous megaliths, which gave the name Trilithon to the Jupiter temple in Byzantine times. These measure from 63 to 64 ft. in length and 13 ft. in height and breadth, and have been raised 20 ft. above the ground. ”

“ For the temple that was built in the time of our fathers, upon the same foundations with the first, which was consumed by fire, is found to differ from the ancient temple in nothing but in magnificence and the richness of the materials, having three rows of columns in the south front, and two on each side. The body is divided into three temples, parallel to one another, the partition walls forming their common sides. The middle temple is dedicated to Jupiter; and on one side stands that of Juno, and on the other that of Minerva. And all three have but one pediment and one roof. ”

“ Gifford.
[508] Deprendas.
"Sorrow nor joy can be disguised by art,
Our foreheads blab the secrets of our heart." Dryden.
[509] Isis. Cf. vi., 489, "Aut apud Isiacæ potius sacraria lenæ."
[510] Pacis. Vespasian built the splendid temple of Peace near the Forum, A.D. 76. Dio., lxvi., 15. Suet., Vesp. 9. In it, or near it, stood the statue of Ganymede. Others think that Ganymedes is put for the temple of Jupiter. ”

“ In the middle of the City she built a Temple to Jupiter Belus of exceeding great height, |Temple of Belus.| by the advantage of which, the Chaldean Astrologers observ’d the setting and rising of the Stars. Upon the top of it she plac’d three Statues of Jupiter, Juno and Rhea, all of beaten Gold. That of Jupiter was about 40 Foot high, and Juno held in her hand a Scepter adorn’d with precious Stones. ”

“ So she told Prometheus to follow her up Mount Olympus; but she did not notice a little twig that he carried in his hand: and if she had noticed it, she would not have thought it mattered. Wise people don’t notice all the little things that cunning people do. Then she opened the golden gate of the sky, and let him in. She was very kind, and showed him everything. He went over the palace of the gods, and saw Jupiter’s great ivory throne, and his eagle, and the brew-house where the nectar is made. ”

“ How joyfully she mounted! sometimes looking up to marvel at the height of the steps, which seemed to ascend into the very sky, sometimes looking down at her little shell of honey, thinking how brightly it shone, like pure gold, and how pleased Jupiter would be with it. At last she stood upon the summit of Olympus, and with timid step walked through the circle of gazing immortals, until she came before the throne of Jupiter. ”

“ No astronomer ever seriously entertained the notion that there was such a system of attendants revolving around Jupiter until their existence had been demonstrated once and for all by the telescope of Galileo.
There can be no doubt that the moons of Jupiter are in themselves quite bright enough to be ordinarily seen by the unaided eye were it not for a single circumstance. They lie too close to the great planet. At first sight it might seem that the very fact that they are placed in the brilliant illumination which Jupiter radiates should rather tend to make them more easily discerned. ”

“ Looking at Jupiter in this way, it interests us not as the probable abode of intelligent life, but as a world in the making, a world, moreover, which, when it is completed—if it ever shall be after the terrestrial pattern—will dwarf our globe into insignificance. That stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes. The telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the spirit upon the face of the great deep. ”

“ But the position assigned to him in the mythology of Olympus, which provides him with the second of his characters, is chosen with great skill. Although at first sight Sea may appear a more substantive and awful power than Air, and Earth a more solid and worthy foundation of dominion than either, yet consideration must readily show, that as the king of the atmosphere, Jupiter is possessed of far more prompt, effective, and above all, universal means of acting upon mankind, than he would have been had the lottery been so arranged as to give him either of those other provinces. ”

“ Since the telescope is unable to penetrate the cloudy envelope we can only guess at the actual constitution of the interior of Jupiter's globe. In a spirit of mere speculative curiosity it has been suggested that deep under the clouds of the great planet there may be a comparatively small solid globe, even a habitable world, closed round by a firmament all its own, whose vault, raised 30,000 or 40,000 miles above the surface of the imprisoned planet, appears only an unbroken dome, too distant to reveal its real nature to watchers below, except, perhaps, under telescopic scrutiny ”

“ It is, of course, obvious that the heat of the planet is [Pg 257] inconsiderable when compared with the heat of the sun. The brilliance of Jupiter, which makes it an object of such splendour in our midnight sky, is derived from the same great source which illuminates the earth, the moon, or the other planets. Jupiter, in fact, shines by reflected sunlight, and not in virtue of any intrinsic light in his globe. A beautiful proof of this truth is familiar to every user of a telescope. The little satellites of the planet sometimes intrude between him and the sun, and cast a shadow on Jupiter. ”

“ Indeed, color and motion are so conspicuous in the immense spectacle presented by Jupiter that they impart to it a powerful suggestion of life, which the mind does not readily divest itself of when compelled to face the evidence that Jupiter is as widely different from the earth, and as diametrically opposed to lifelike conditions, as we comprehend them, as a planet possibly could be. ”

“ At the press briefing, Brad Smith made a spectacular announcement: “This morning I would like to add yet another important discovery to be claimed by this outstanding mission—that of a thin flat ring of particles surrounding Jupiter. Thus Jupiter now joins Saturn and Uranus to become the third planet of our solar system known to possess a planetary ring system and leaves Neptune as the only member of the group of giant planets without a known ring. ”

“ Beyond a few ill-defined and inconspicuous marks, nothing has ever been seen on this planet which is of any interest for our present purpose. Though clouds are comparatively an unimportant feature on Mars, they assume the most extraordinary importance on Jupiter. He is a gigantic body, by far the largest of all the planets; larger, indeed, than all the other planets put together. Viewed in the telescope, the surface of Jupiter is usually seen crossed by two belts, one above and one below his equator. ”

“ The measurements of the amount of helium, of the gravitational field, and of the size of the internal heat source on Jupiter greatly clarified scientists’ understanding of the deep interior of the planet. Calculations showed that the core of Jupiter must be so hot that hydrogen cannot become solid, but must remain a fluid throughout the interior. Even at great depths, therefore, Jupiter does not have a solid surface. The theory that the Great Red Spot was the result of interactions with a surface feature below the clouds thus became untenable. ”

“ It shines merely as the earth itself shines, or as the moon shines, or the planet Mars, or Venus, or Saturn, by the sunbeams which fall upon it. As to the light which illumines the satellites of Jupiter, it also can only come from the sun. We cannot, indeed, say that the light-radiating power of a certain area on Jupiter is the same as that from an equal area on one of his moons. There are certainly intrinsic differences between the material constitution of the great planet and of his satellites which prevent us from affirming that they are at all times equally capable of reflecting light. ”

“ When we are thinking of worlds, and trying to exalt the imagination with them, it is well to turn to Jupiter, for there is a planet worth pondering upon! A world thirteen hundred times as voluminous as the earth is a phenomenon calculated to make us feel somewhat as the inhabitant of a rural village does when his amazed vision ranges across the million roofs of a metropolis. Jupiter is the first of the outer and greater planets, the major, or Jovian, group. His mean diameter is 86,500 miles, and his average girth more than 270,000 miles. ”

“ To begin, then: they who are called theologists say that there are three Jupiters; the first and second of whom were born in Arcadia; one of whom was the son of Æther, and father of Proserpine and Bacchus; the other the son of Cœlus, and father of Minerva, who is called the Goddess and inventress of war; the third one born of Saturn in the isle of Crete, [20] where his sepulchre is shown. The sons of Jupiter (Διόσκουροι) also, among the Greeks, have many names ”

“ Giant Jupiter has an enormous realm—from the size of its satellite system to its tremendous aurorae and superbolts of lightning, to the huge planet-sized cloud features that surround its atmosphere. The most gargantuan Jovian feature is its magnetosphere, which envelopes the satellites and constantly changes in size, pumping in and out at the whim of the solar wind. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft provided four cuts through this dynamic region, showing that its borders in the upwind solar direction lie between 50 RJ and 100 RJ from Jupiter. ”