Some privileges of the flamen of Jupiter may reflect the regal nature of Jupiter: he had the use of the curule chair,Livy I 20, 1–2. and was the only priest (sacerdos) who was preceded by a lictorPlutarch Quaestiones Romanae 113. and had a seat in the senate.Livy XXVII 8, 8. Other regulations concern his ritual purity and his separation from the military function; he was forbidden to ride a horse or see the army outside the sacred boundary of Rome (pomerium). Although he served the god who embodied the sanctity of the oath, it was not religiously permissible (fas) for the Dialis to swear an oath.Aulus Gellius, 10.15.5: item iurare Dialem fas numquam est; Robert E.A. Palmer, "The Deconstruction of Mommsen on Festus 462/464L, or the Hazards of Interpretation," in Imperium sine fine: T. Robert S. Broughton and the Roman Republic (Franz Steiner, 1996), p. 85; Francis X. Ryan, Rank and Participation in the Republican Senate (Franz Steiner, 1998), p. 165. The Vestals and the Flamen Dialis were the only Roman citizens who could not be compelled to swear an oath (Aulus Gellius 10.15.31); Robin Lorsch Wildfang, Rome's Vestal Virgin: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Routledge, 2006), p. 69. He could not have contacts with anything dead or connected with death: corpses, funerals, funeral fires, raw meat. This set of restrictions reflects the fulness of life and absolute freedom that are features of Jupiter.Dumézil 1977 p. 147.
