James George Frazer

The possession of the sacred fire and of the ancestral sticks, carrying with it both political authority and priestly dignity, descends in the male line, and hence generally passes from father to son.

The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi, “Diana's Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients.