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Men who are credited
with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest
place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the
temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in
civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as
well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots
deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are
sapped by a profounder view of nature and man.
In the classical period of Greek and Latin antiquity the reign of
kings was for the most part a thing of the past; yet the stories of
their lineage, titles, and pretensions suffice to prove that they
too claimed to rule by divine right and to exercise superhuman
powers. Hence we may without undue temerity assume that the King of
the Wood at Nemi, though shorn in later times of his glory and
fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who had
once received not only the homage but the adoration of their
subjects in return for the manifold blessings which they were
supposed to dispense.


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