Optimus Maximus: The God of the Roman State

The Capitoline temple that gave Jupiter Optimus Maximus his central Roman home had a building history as turbulent as the Republic itself. Tradition credited its vow to king Tarquinius Priscus and its completion to Tarquinius Superbus, and later Romans dated its dedication to 509 BCE, the very first year of the Republic, as though the fall of the monarchy and the god's great house belonged to the same founding moment. Fire destroyed the temple during the civil war of 83 BCE, and Sulla rebuilt it; it burned again in 69 CE, during the fighting that made and unmade three emperors in a single year, and was rebuilt once more under Vespasian, only to burn a third time in 80 CE under Titus.

The final rebuilding, completed under Domitian at the end of the first century CE, was the most lavish of all, faced in white Pentelic marble with gilded roof tiles, and it stood as the temple that later visitors and ancient sources took as the definitive image of the sanctuary, even though nothing physical of any phase now survives above ground. That repeated cycle of destruction and ever more magnificent rebuilding across five centuries is itself a kind of monument to how central Jupiter's cult remained to Roman civic identity through the Republic and into the high Empire.