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Lares ( ,[1]. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; archaic lasēs, singular lar) were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been hero-ancestors, guardians of the hearth, fields, boundaries, or fruitfulness, or an amalgam of these.
Lares were believed to observe, protect, and influence all that happened within the boundaries of their location or function. The statues of domestic Lares were placed at the table during family meals; their presence, cult, and blessing seem to have been required at all important family events.
Roman writers sometimes identify or conflate them with ancestor-deities, domestic Penates, and the hearth.
Because of these associations, Lares are sometimes categorised as household deity, but some had much broader domains. Roadways, seaways, agriculture, livestock, towns, cities, the state, and its military were all under the protection of their particular Lar or Lares. Those who protected local neighbourhoods ( Vicus) were housed in the crossroad shrines ( Compitalia), which served as a focus for the religious, social, and political lives of their local, overwhelmingly plebeian communities. Their cult officials included freedmen and slaves, otherwise excluded by status or property qualifications from most administrative and religious offices.
Compared to Rome's major deities, Lares had limited scope and potency, but archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life. By analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lar). Despite official bans on non-Christian cults from the late fourth century AD onwards, unofficial cults to Lares persisted until at least the early fifth century AD.
No physical Lar images survive from before the Late Republican era, but literary references (such as Plautus' singular Lar, above) suggest that cult could be offered to a single Lar, and sometimes many more; in the case of the obscure Lares Grundules, perhaps 30. By the early Imperial era, they had become paired divinities, probably through the influences of Greek religion – in particular, the heroic twin Dioscuri – and the iconography of Rome's semidivine founder-twins, Romulus and Remus. Lares are represented as two small, youthful, lively male figures clad in short, rustic, girdled tunics – made of dogskin, according to Plutarch.Plutarch, Roman Questions, 52: see Waites, 258 for analysis of chthonic connections between the Lares' dogskin tunic, Hecate and the Lares of the crossroads ( Lares Compitalicii). They take a dancer's attitude, tiptoed or lightly balanced on one leg. One arm raises a drinking horn ( rhyton) aloft as if to offer a toast or libation; the other bears a shallow libation dish ( patera). Compitalia shrines of the same period show Lares figures of the same type. Painted shrine-images of paired Lares show them in mirrored poses to the left and right of a central figure, understood to be an ancestral genius.
Ovid may imply that the Lares Praestites were of Sabines origin, although the exact meaning of the passage is obscure due to the corruption of the manuscript tradition. The current Loeb Classical Library edition of the Fasti, which was translated by James G. Frazer in 1931, renders the sentence in question as "voverat illa quidem Curius," which it renders as "Curius indeed had vowed them." However, the classicist Harriet I. Flower suggests that the text may reference the Sabine town of Cures. The 1st-century BCE Roman author Varro claims that the Lares—along with numerous other deities—were "dedicated" at Rome ("voto sunt Romae dedicatae") by Titus Tatius, a legendary king of the Sabines.Varro. De Lingua Latina. 5.74. Moreover, the Greek author Strabo claims that Titus Tatius and Numa Pompilius both originated from the city of Cures.Strabo. Geography. 5.3.1.
Ovid also describes a story in which the naiad Lara, after being raped by Mercury, becomes mother to the Lares.Ovid. Fasti. 2.583-616. The classicist T. P. Wiseman connects this legend to a scene on a Praenestine mirror that depicts two infants suckling the breasts of a she-wolf. Wiseman interprets this scene as a representation of the story of the foundation of Rome, though he does not consider the twins to equate to Romulus and Remus, as—according to Wiseman—the assumption that the mirror portrays the standard version of the myth creates issues with the identification of the other figures in the artwork. Instead, Wiseman suggests that the mirror portrays Hermes and Dea Tacita—who was identified by Ovid with Lara—and that the children are the Lares Praestites. Wiseman's interpretation is not universally accepted, with the classicist Ana Mayorgas Rodriguez stating that "although the surrounding figures cannot be recognised certainly, it is still most probable that the children are Romulus and Remus." According to the classicist Tim Cornell, a possible connection between the Lares Praestites and the founding of Rome may itself relate to a potential characterization of the Lares as "deified ancestors." Wisseman further argues that the possible presence of the Lares Praestites on this mirror could indicate that the standard story of Romulus and Remus did not exist by 340 BCE—around the date of the creation of the mirror. However, the classicist Fay Glinister criticizes this argument, stating that it relies upon ignorance of "early iconographic evidence."
The Lares Praestites were housed in the state Regia, near the temple of Vesta, with whose worship and sacred hearth they were associated; they seem to have protected Rome from malicious or destructive fire. They may have also functioned as the neighbourhood Lares of Octavian (the later emperor Augustus), who owned a house between the Temple of Vesta and the Regia. Augustus later gave this house and care of its Lares to the Vestals: this donation reinforced the religious bonds between the Lares of his household, his neighbourhood, and the State. His Compitalia reforms extended this identification to every neighbourhood Lares shrine. However, Lares Praestites and the Lares Compitales (renamed Lares Augusti) should probably not be considered identical. Their local festivals were held at the same Compitalia shrines, but at different times.
Ovid mentions an altar to the Lares Praestites that was built during the Calends of May.Ovid. Fasti. 5.129-142. According to Ovid, this altar had decayed due to the wears of time, which may—according to classicist Howard Scullard—indicate waning interest in the Lares Praestites. Ovid also mentions a carved-out statue of a dog placed by this same altar. Similarly, Plutarch, a 1st-century Greek author, mentions that a dog is placed by a statue of the Lares Praestites, who are themselves supposedly adorned in dog skins. Despite the literary connection of dogs with the Lares Praestites, there is little known material evidence corroborating this relationship. It is perhaps possible that such imagery may feature on a denarius dated to around 112-111 BCE that showcases two seated Lares as young men armed with spears placed by a dog. For unclear reasons, there seemingly exists a depiction of the god Vulcan upon this coin alongside the image of the Lares Praestites, though it may indicate a connection between the two mythological entities. According to Flower, the image depicted upon this coin may equate to the aforementioned shrine described by Ovid. Still, Flower considers the exact location of the site to be "hypothetical" as it has not been confirmed through archaeological excavation. Further evidence may derive from a statue depicting a Lare dated to around 100 BCE that is currently stored in the Louvre. According to the classical scholar Alexandra Sofronview, the design of the tunic of this Lare is unusual and it may stylistically portray a garment fashioned from dog-skin.
Ovid explains the canine associations as the result of numerous supposed parallels between dogs and the Lares. According to Ovid, both dogs and the Lares Praestites guard the house, are loyal to their master, are wakeful ("pervigilant]]"), and chase thieves. Additionally, Ovid notes that crossroads are "dear" to dogs and to the Lares, which may reference the Lares Compitales. Alternatively, the classicist Eli Edward Buriss suggests a relationship between the dogs of the Lares Praestites and the general connection between dogs and witches or deities such as Hecate. Likewise, the classicist Margaret Waites proposed that the imagery of dogs indicated that the Lares Praestites possessed chthonic characteristics. In support of this theory, Waites similarly cites the association between chthonic beings such as Hecate and dogs in other areas of Graeco-Roman religion. Plutarch does not provide a definitive explanation for this practice, although he suggests that the custom may have emerged because "it is fitting that those who stand before a house" to—like some dogs—be "terrifying to strangers, but gentle and mild to the inmates." Another possibility, also mentioned by Plutarch, maintains that the Lares Praestites were closely associated with dogs due to a belief that the animals were effective in tracking "evil-doers." Plutarch himself notes that this proposal is partially reliant upon a belief that the Lares could function as delivers of divine justice, in a manner similar to the Erinyes.Plutarch. . Another theory, advanced by the classicist Christopher A. Faraone, relates the canine symbolism to Assyria guardian statues.
Responsibility for household cult and the behaviour of family members ultimately fell to the family head, the paterfamilias, but he could, and indeed should on certain occasions properly delegate the cult and care of his Lares to other family members, especially his servants.The "proper occasions" included the household's participation in the Compitalia festival. Clear evidence is otherwise lacking for the executive roles of subservient household members in household cults. The positioning of the Lares at the House of Menander suggest that the paterfamilias delegated this religious task to his villicus (bailiff).Allison, P., 2006, The Insula of Menander at Pompeii, Vol.III, The Finds; A Contextual Study Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Care and cult attendance to domestic Lares could include offerings of spelt wheat and grain-garlands, honey cakes and honeycombs, grapes and first fruits, wine, and incense.Orr, 23. They could be served at any time and not always by intention; in addition to the formal offerings that seem to have been their due, any food that fell to the floor during house banquets was theirs.Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 28, 27. On important occasions, wealthier households may have offered their own Lares a pig. A single source describes Romulus' provision of an altar and sacrifice to Lares Grundules ('grunting lares') after an unusually large farrowing of 30 piglets. The circumstances of this offering are otherwise unknown, Taylor conjectures the sacrifice of a pig, possibly a pregnant sow.Taylor, 303: citing Cassius Hemina ap. Diomedes I, p384 K; Nonius, p 114 M. Taylor notes that the story's association with Lavinius, Rome, and Alba: "In view of the frequent identity between God and sacrificial victim, it is worth noting that the pig was the most usual offering to the Lares, just as the pregnant animal and particularly the pregnant sow was a common sacrifice to the earth goddess."
In households of modest means, small Lar statuettes were set in wall-niches, sometimes merely a tile-support projecting from a painted background. In wealthier households, they tend to be found in servant's quarters and working areas."The architecture of the ancient Romans was, from first to last, an art of shaping space around ritual:" Clarke, 1, citing Frank E. Brown, Roman Architecture, (New York, 1961, 9. Clarke views Roman ritual as twofold; some is prescribed and ceremonial, and includes activities which might be called, in modern terms, religious; some is what might be understood in modern terms as secular conventions – the proper and habitual way of doing things. For Romans, both activities were matters of lawful custom ( mos maiorum) rather than religious as opposed to secular. At Pompeii, the Lares and lararium of the sophisticated, unpretentious and artistically restrained House of MenanderNamed after its particularly fine fresco of Menander were associated with its servant quarters and adjacent agricultural estate. Its statuary was unsophisticated, "rustic" and probably of ancient type or make. The placing of Lares in the public or semi-public parts of a house, such as its cavaedium, enrolled them in the more outward, theatrical functions of household religion.Kaufmann-Heinimann, in Rüpke (ed), 200: in some cases, the artistic display of the lararium seems to displace its religious function.
The House of the Vettii in Pompeii had two lararia; one was positioned out of public view, and was probably used in private household rites. The other was placed boldly front-of-house, among a riot of Greek-inspired mythological wall-paintings and the assorted statuary of patron divinities.The more public lararium is exceptionally large; it measures 1.3 x 2.25 m and faces onto the atrium internal courtyard of the building. Its painted deities are framed by stonework in the form of a classical temple, complete with finely carved pediment to support a patera for offerings. With its painted deities and mythological scenes, such a lararium would certainly have made a powerful impression. See Allison, P., 2006, The Insula of Menander at Pompeii, Vol.III, The Finds; A Contextual Study Oxford: Clarendon Press. Its positioning in a relatively public part of the domus would have provided a backdrop for the probably interminable salutatio (formal greeting) between its upwardly mobile owners and their strings of clients and "an assorted group of unattached persons who made the rounds of salutationes to assure their political and economic security".Clarke, 4, 208, 264: the Vettii brothers had been freedmen and successful entrepreneurs, possibly in the wine business. Their house is designed and decorated in the so-called Fourth Style and imports courtyard elements of the rural villa. According to Clarke, their "semipublic" lararium and its surrounding walls – decorated with a riot of deities and mythological scenes – reflects the increasing secularisation of household religion during this period.
Domestic Lararia were also used as a sacred, protective depository for commonplace symbols of family change and continuity. In his coming-of-age, a boy gave his personal amulet (bulla) to his Lares before he put on his manly toga (toga virilis). Once his first beard had been ritually cut off, it was placed in their keeping.Clarke, 9–10; citing Propertius, 4.1.131-2 & Persius, The Satires, 5.30-1. On the night before her wedding, a Roman girl surrendered her dolls, soft balls, and breastbands to her family Lares, as a sign she had come of age. On the day of her marriage, she transferred her allegiance to her husband's neighbourhood Lares ( Lares Compitalici) by paying them a copper coin en route to her new home. She paid another to her new domestic Lares, and one to her husband. If the marriage made her a materfamilias, she took joint responsibility with her husband for aspects of household cult.Orr, 15–16.Clarke, 10.
While the supervision of the vici and their religious affairs may have been charged to the Roman elite who occupied most magistracies and priesthoods,Lott, 32 ff. management of the day-to-day affairs and public amenities of neighbourhoods – including their religious festivals – was the responsibility of freedmen and their slave-assistants. The Compitalia was an official festival but during the Republican era, its shrines appear to have been funded locally, probably by subscription among the plebeians, freedmen and slaves of the vici. Their support through private benefaction is nowhere attested, and official attitudes to the Republican Compitalia seem equivocal at best: The Compitalia games (Ludi Compitalicii) included popular theatrical religious performances of raucously subversive flavour:Pliny, Natural History, 36.204; Cicero, In Pisonem, 8; Propertius, 2.22.3–36. Compitalia thus offered a religiously sanctioned outlet for free speech and populist subversion. At some time between 85 and 82 BC, the Compitalia shrines were the focus of cult to the ill-fated popularist politician Marcus Marius Gratidianus during his praetorship. What happened – if anything – to the Compitalia festivals and games in the immediate aftermath of his public, ritualised murder by his opponents is not known but in 68 BC the games at least were suppressed as "disorderly".Lott, 28–51.
Augustus officially confirmed the plebeian-servile character of Compitalia as essential to his "restoration" of Roman tradition, and formalised their offices; the vici and their religious affairs were now the responsibility of official magistri vici, usually freedmen, assisted by ministri vici who were usually slaves. A dedication of 2 BC to the Augustan Lares lists four slaves as shrine-officials of their vicus.Their shrine is named as Stata Mater, probably after a nearby statue of that goddess. Given their slave status, their powers are debatable but they clearly constitute an official body. Their inscribed names, and those of their owners, are contained within an oak-wreath cartouche. The oak-leaf chaplet was voted to Augustus as "saviour" of Rome;The oak was sacred to Jupiter and the award of an oak leaf chaplet was reserved for those who had saved the life of a fellow-citizen. As Rome's "saviour", Augustus had saved the lives of all. Senators, knights ( equites), plebs, freedmen and slaves were "under his protection" as pater patriae (father of the country), a title apparently urged by the general populace. He was symbolic pater ('father') of the Roman state, and though his genius was owed cult by his extended family, its offer seems to have been entirely voluntary. Hardly any of the reformed Compital shrines show evidence of cult to the emperor's genius.Galinsky, in Rüpke (ed), 78–79. Augustus acted with the political acumen of any responsible patronus ('patron'); his subdivision of the vici created new opportunities for his clients. It repaid honour with honours, which for the plebs meant offices, priesthood, and the respect of their peers;Beard et al, vol 2, 207–208: section 8.6a, citing ILS 9250. at least for some. In Petronius' Satyricon, a magistrate's lictor bangs on Trimalchio's door; it causes a fearful stir but in comes Habinnas, one of Augustus' new priests, a stonemason by trade; dressed up in his regalia, perfumed and completely drunk.Beard et al, vol 2, p. 208, sect. 8.6b: citing Petronius, Satyricon, 65.
Ovid's poetic myth appears to draw on remnants of ancient rites to the Mater Larum, surviving as folk-cult among women at the fringes of the Feralia: an old woman sews up a fish-head, smears it with pitch then pierces and roasts it to bind hostile tongues to silence: she thus invokes Dea Tacita. If, as Ovid proposes, the lemures are an unsatiated, malevolent and wandering form of Lares, then they and their mother also find their way into Lemuralia, when the hungry Lemures gather in Roman houses and claim cult from the living. The paterfamilias must redeem himself and his family with the offer of midnight libations of spring-water, and black beans spat onto the floor. Any lemures dissatisfied with these offerings are scared away by the loud clashing of bronze pots. Taylor notes the chthonic character of offerings made to fall – or deliberately expelled – towards the earth. If their mother's nature connects the Lares to the earth they are, according to Taylor, spirits of the departed.Taylor, 300–301.
Plutarch offers a legend of Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, credited with the founding of the Lares' public festival, Compitalia. Servius' virginal slave mother-to-be is impregnated by a phallus-apparition arising from the hearth,also in Pliny, Natural History, 36, 70. or some other divine being held to be a major deity or ancestor-hero by some, a Lar by others: the latter seems to have been a strong popular tradition. During the Augustan era, Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports Servius' fathering by a Lar and his pious founding of Compitalia as common knowledge, and the Lar as equivalent to the Greek hero; semi-divine, ancestral and protective of place.Lott, 31: citing Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.14.3–4.Plutarch, Moralia, On the fortune of the Romans, 10, 64: available online (Loeb) at Thayer's website [7] (accessed 6 January 1020)Lott, 35.
These stories connect the Lar to the hearth, the underworld, generative powers (however embodied), nourishment, forms of divine or semi-divine ancestry and the coupling of the divine with the servile, wherein those deprived by legal or birth-status of a personal gens could serve, and be served by, the cults attached to Compitalia and Larentalia. Mommsen's contention that Lares were originally field deities is not incompatible with their role as ancestors and guardians. A rural familia relied on the productivity of their estate and its soil: around the early 2nd century BC, Plautus's Lares Familiares protects the house, and familia as he has always done, and safeguards their secrets.Plautus, Aulularia, 2–5. See Hunter, 2008 for analysis.
The little mythography that belongs to the Lares seems inventive and poetic. With no traditional, systematic theology to limit their development, Lares became a single but usefully nebulous type, with many functions. In Cicero's day, one's possession of domestic Lares laid moral claim of ownership and belonging to one's domicile.Cicero, de Domo sua, 108–109, for the domestic presence of the Lares and Penates as an indication of ownership. Festus identifies them as "gods of the underworld" (di inferi).Festus, 239. To Granius Flaccus, they are ancestral genii (s. genius). Apuleius considers them benevolent ancestral spirits; they belong both to the underworld and to particular places of the human world. To him, this distinguishes them from the divine and eternal genius which inhabits, protects and inspires living men: and having specific physical domains, they cannot be connected with the malicious, vagrant lemures.Apuleius, de Deo Socratis, 15. In the 4th century AD the Christian polemicist Arnobius, claiming among others Varro (116–27 BC) as his source, describes them as once-human spirits of the underworld, therefore ancestral manes-ghosts; but also as "gods of the air", or the upper world. He also – perhaps uniquely in the literature but still claiming Varro's authority – categorises them with the frightful Lemures.Arnobius, Adversus nationes, 3.41.Taylor, 299–301: citing Martianus Capella, II, 162. The ubiquity of Lares seems to have offered considerable restraints on Christian participation in Roman public life. In the 3rd century AD, Tertullian remarks the inevitable presence of Lares in pagan households as good reason to forbid marriage between pagan men and Christian women: the latter would be "tormented by the vapor of incense each time the demons are honored, each solemn festivity in honor of the emperors, each beginning of the year, each beginning of the month."Bowersock, Brown, Grabar et al., Late antiquity: a guide to the postclassical world, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press Reference Library, 1999, p. 27, citing Tertullian, Ad Uxorem, 6.1. Yet their type proved remarkably persistent. In the early 5th century AD, after the official suppression of non-Christian cults, Rutilius Namatianus could write of a famine-stricken district whose inhabitants had no choice but to "abandon their Lares" (thus, to desert their rat-infested houses).Rutilius Namatianus, de Reditu suo, 290: Latin text at Thayer's website [8] (accessed 6 January 2010)
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