Lares

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 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.

[24] 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.

Painted lararia from Pompeii show two Lares flanking a genius or ancestor-figure, who wears his toga in the priestly manner prescribed for sacrificers.

[29] At Pompeii, the Lares and lararium of the sophisticated, unpretentious and artistically restrained House of Menander[30] were associated with its servant quarters and adjacent agricultural estate.

[32] 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".

[39] So although the Lares Compitalicii were held to protect all the community, regardless of social class, their festival had a distinctly plebeian ambiance, and a measure of Saturnalia's reversal of the status quo.

Tradition required that the Lares Compitalicii be served by men of very low legal and social status, not merely plebeians, but freedmen and slaves, to whom "even the heavy-handed Cato recommended liberality during the festival".

[41] And [the Romans] still observe the ancient custom in connection with those sacrifices propitiating the heroes by the ministry of their servants and during these days removing every badge of their servitude, in order that the slaves, being softened by this instance of humanity, which has something great and solemn about it, may make themselves more agreeable to their masters and be less sensible of the severity of their condition.

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.

[47][48] The iconography of these shrines celebrates their sponsor's personal qualities and achievements and evokes a real or re-invented continuity of practice from ancient times.

[49] The Compitalia reforms were ingenious and genuinely popular; they valued the traditions of the Roman masses and won their political, social and religious support.

[50] The Augustan model persisted until the end of the Western Empire, with only minor and local modifications, and the Lares Augusti would always be identified with the ruling emperor, the Augustus, whatever his personal or family name.

The oak-leaf chaplet was voted to Augustus as "saviour" of Rome;[53] 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.

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.

[56] From the Late Republican and early Imperial eras, the priestly records of the Arval Brethren and the speculative commentaries of a very small number of literate Romans attest to a Mother of the Lares (Mater Larum).

AD 395–430) describes the woolen figurines hung at crossroad shrines during Compitalia as maniae, supposed as an ingenious substitution for child sacrifices to the Mater Larum, instituted by Rome's last monarch and suppressed by its first consul, L. Junius Brutus.

[59] Modern scholarship takes the Arval rites to the Mother of the Lares as typically chthonic, and the goddess herself as a dark or terrible aspect of the earth-mother, Tellus.

Ovid supplies or elaborates an origin-myth for the Mater Larum as a once-loquacious nymph, Lara, whose tongue is cut out as punishment for her betrayal of Jupiter's secret amours.

[60][61] 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.

[62] 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,[63] 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.

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.

[70] 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.

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).