Bident Jupiter (also known as Jove, Etruscan Tinia), the trident or bident thus represents a forked lightning bolt. In ancient Italy, thunder and lightning were read as signs of divine will, wielded by the sky god Jupiter in three forms or degrees of severity (see "manubia"). The Romans drew on Etruscan traditions for the interpretation of these signs. A tile found at Urbs Salvia in Picenum depicts an unusual composite Jove, "fairly bristling with weapons": a lightning bolt, a bident, and a trident, uniting the realms of sky, earth, and sea, and representing the three degrees of ominous lightning (see also
Eclogues a new political mythology, Eclogue 4 reaches out to imagine a golden age ushered in by the birth of a boy heralded as "great increase of Jove" ("magnum Iovis incrementum"), which ties in with divine associations claimed in the propaganda of Octavian, the ambitious young heir to Julius Caesar. The poet makes this notional scion of Jove the occasion to predict his own up the scale in epos, rising from the humble range of the bucolic to the lofty range of the heroic, potentially rivaling Homer: he thus signals his own ambition to make Roman epic that will culminate in