Jupiter is a planet between Mars and Saturn. Also it was venerated as being associated with the Roman God Jupiter who was protector of the state. In Roman times Jupiter was thought to be more temperate than Mars (very hot) or Saturn (very cold). The author Vitruvius therefore equated Jupiter with the Roman people who lived in a temperate region, between hotter lands to the south and colder lands to the north. (Kremer, 2025)

"Jupiter, climbing with gentler pace against the revolution of the firmament, travels through each sign in about three hundred and sixty days, and finishes in eleven years and three hundred and thirteen days, returning to the sign in which he had been twelve years before" (Vitruvius, Book VII, Chapter 1).

Hypaethral edifices are open to the sky in honor of Jupiter Lightning, "whose semblances and manifestations we behold before our very eyes in the sky when it is cloudless and bright". (Vitruvius, Book I, Chapter 2) Also one of the gods for whom the protection of the state rests, whose temples should be on the highest spot "commanding a view of the greater part of the city" (Vitruvius, Book I, Chapter 7).

"The reason why some of these stars are temperate, others hot, and others cold, appears to be this: that the flame of every kind of fire rises to higher places. Consequently, the burning rays of the sun make the ether above him white hot, in the regions of the course of Mars, and so the heat of the sun makes him hot. Saturn, on the contrary, being nearest to the outermost limit of the firmament and bordering on the quarters of the heaven which are frozen, is excessively cold. Hence, Jupiter, whose course is between the orbits of these two, appears to have a moderate and very temperate influence, intermediate between their cold and heat." (Vitruvius, 15 BCE, Book IX, Chapter 1)

"In fact, the races of Italy are the most perfectly constituted in both respects—in bodily form and in mental activity to correspond to their valour. Exactly as the planet Jupiter is itself temperate, its course lying midway between Mars, which is very hot, and Saturn, which is very cold, so Italy, lying between the north and the south, is a combination of what is found on each side, and her preëminence is well regulated and indisputable. And so by her wisdom she breaks the courageous onsets of the[174] barbarians, and by her strength of hand thwarts the devices of the southerners. Hence, it was the divine intelligence that set the city of the Roman people in a peerless and temperate country, in order that it might acquire the right to command the whole world." (Vitruvius, 15 BCE, Book VI, Chapter 1)

triad of gods

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