lares

For other meanings, see Lares (disambiguation).

Lar statuette, bronze, 1st century AD (Capitoline Museum, Rome).

Lares (sing. Lar) – or archaically, Lases – were ancient Roman protective deities. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been guardians of the house, fields, boundaries or fruitfulness, unnamed hero-ancestors, or an amalgam of these. By the late Republican era they were venerated in the form of small statues of a standardised form, usually paired.

Lares were thought to observe and influence all that happened within the boundaries of their location or function. The statues of domestic Lares were placed at table during family meals; their presence, cult and blessing seem to have been required at all important family functions. Some ancient (and some modern) scholarship therefore categorises them as household gods. Roman writers sometimes identify or confuse them with ancestral deities, the domestic Penates and the hearth. Compared to Rome's major deities, their scope and potency was limited but they were important objects of cult: by analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lares).

Lares were celebrated and given cult in a number of public Festivals. Some guarded entire vici (districts or political wards). Their crossroad or boundary shrines (Compitales) were a supposed institution of Servius Tullius and were a focus for the religious, social and political life of their local, overwhelmingly plebian communities. Compital cult officials included freedmen and slaves, who were otherwise excluded by status or property qualification from most religious, administrative and religious offices. These community cults and festivals were co-opted by the religious, social and political reforms of the Augustan settlement. Cults to the Lares of households and communities endured to at least the 4th century AD.

Images of the Lar

The Lar is small, youthful, lively and male, rustically clad in a short, girdled tunic – made of dogskin, according to Plutarch.^[1]. He takes 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). Surviving shrine paintings show identical, paired Lares; this leads to the interpretation of Lares as twin deities, as in Ovid's time. Lar statues and paintings shows little or no individuation and only minor stylistic variations from this basic type.

This section requires expansion with: examples and citations.

Lares and Lararia

Lararia (s. lararium) are domestic shrines and altars to the Lares and other household gods, including household penates and genius images. They could be found in virtually any room of any house; bedrooms, private rooms of now uncertain purpose but especially in working areas such as kitchen and stores, where the Lares shared the realm of the Penates. Most are small niches, or merely a small tile projecting from the wall, simply decorated and equipped but no less valued for that.^[2] The housing of Lares in relatively private spaces attests to their more private and intimate relationships with the familia. Their placing in the public or semi-public parts of a house, such as its atrium, enrolled them in more outward, theatrical functions of household religion.

In Pompeii, the sophisticated, artistically restrained villa now known as the House of Menander^[3] combines features of a villa urbana and villa rustica, with an adjacent agricultural estate and a lararium associated with "rustic" statuary. Its villicus (bailif) may have doubled as custodian or priest of the Lar and other elements of household cult. The shrine appears to have been in active use during the mid-first century AD when Pompeii was destroyed.

Pompeian lararium at the House of the Vettii. Two Lares flank an ancestor-genius holding patera (bowl) and incense box, his head respectfully covered as if for sacrifice. The snake is associated with the land's fertility and thus prosperity; it approaches a low, laden altar. The shrine's tympanum shows a patera, ox-skull and knife.^[4]

The Lararium at the House of the Vettii has been interpreted as an expression of upward social mobility among the entrepreneurial classes of the early Empire. It measures 1.3m x 2.25m and faces onto the 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. The surrounding walls are filled with more painted deities and mythological scenes. Such a lararium would have made a powerful impression.^[5] Its positioning in a relatively public part of the domus could provide a focus and 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".^[6]

Literary sources describe Lararia as sacred depositories 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) and his first beard was cut off to be placed in their keeping.^[7] A girl came of age on the night before her wedding; she surrendered her childhood by offering her dolls, soft balls and breastbands to her own family Lares. On day of her marriage, her allegiance transferred from her own family Lares to those of her husband and his community. En route to her new home, she gave one copper coin to the Lar of the crossroads, one 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.^[8][9]

This section requires expansion with: examples and citations.

In Plautus' comedy Aulularia, the Lar of the miserly paterfamilias Euclio reveals a pot of gold hidden beneath "his" houshold hearth. The Lar tells the audience that eventually Euclio's gold will provide his daughter with a dowry; but Euclio would rather hold onto it.^[10]

The Lares and Compitalia

In Republican Rome, the Compitalia was a New Year festival "of the crossroads" (L. compitales), celebrated just after the Saturnalia that closed the old year. It was held to be an institution of the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius, who had favoured the plebians, antagonised the Patricians and was thought to have been the son of a Lar and a slave-girl.^[11] In Rome, each vicus (administrative district or ward) had its permanent Compital shrine, sited at a central crossroads or one that defined its boundary. The shrine housed the Lares who protected all individuals and social classes within their community.

Ultimately, the supervision of cult to the Lares of the vici may have been charged to the Roman elite who occupied most Roman magistracies and priesthoods^[12] but its day-to-day affairs were the responsibility of magistri vici. By tradition, and certainly in the late Republic, the Lares of the vici were served by men of very low legal and social status; poor plebians, freedmen and slaves – in Dionysius' account "the heroes [Lares] looked kindly on the service of slaves":^[13]

"And they 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."^[14]

During the Republican era the shrines appear to have been funded locally, probably by subscription among the plebians, freedmen and slaves of their vici. No records or traditions exist of their support through private benefaction. Notwithstanding Dionysius' observations above, official attitudes to Compitalia during the Late Republic seem equivocal at best; tradition that offered the plebians and the servile an outlets for free speech allowed not just mockery but subversion. At some time between 85 - 82 BC, the Compital shrines were the site of popular 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 is not known but in 68 BC they were suppressed as "disorderly".^[15]

The princeps Augustus restored, reformed and cultivated them. From 7 BC, a Lares' festival of 1 May was dedicated to the Lares Augusti and a new celebration of the Genius Augusti was held on 1 August, the inaugural day for Roman magistracies and personally auspicious for Augutus as the anniversary of his victory at Actium. Whether or not Augustus substituted the public Lares with "his own" Lares is questionable; augusti can be interpreted as descriptive, a shared title and honour (the "august" Lares) but when coupled with his new cult to the Genius Augusti, Augustus' deliberate association with the popular Lares through their shared honorific makes the reformed Compitalia an unmistakable aspect of cult to living emperors – albeit with local flavour.^[16]

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. Some examples are sophisticated, others crude and virtually rustic in style; taken as a whole, their positioning in every vicus (ward) of Rome symbolically extends the ideology of a "refounded" Rome to every part of the city.^[17] Probabably in response to this, provincial cults to the Lares Augusti appear soon afterwards; in Ostia, a Lares Augusti shrine was placed in the forum, which was ritually cleansed for the occasion.^[18] The Augustan model persisted with only minor modifications until the end of the Western Empire, still dedicated to the Lares Augusti and associated with the ruling Emperor by title rather than name. Similar dedications and collegial arrangements are found elsewhere in the Empire.^[19]

Augustus officially confirmed the plebian-servile character of Compitalia as essential to his "restoration" of Roman tradition. Its collegial priesthoods became Augustales. A dedication of 2 BC to the Augustan Lares lists four slaves as shrine-officials of their vicus. ^[20]. 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;^[21] He was pater (father) of the Roman state, and like any paterfamilias his genius was owed duty of cult by those lesser than himself, whether these were family, clients, freedmen and slaves. As a responsible patronus (patron), he repaid honour with honours, which for the plebs meant offices, priesthood and subsidy.^[22] Petronius satirises the arrival at Trimalchio's house of a drunken, minor sevir Augustalis, member of a very small college of six priests of Augustus. The sevir, grandly announced by his lictor, turns out to be a stonemason.^[23]

Cult offerings

The mutual dependence between Lares and those they protected was acknowledged through sacrifice. Formal offerings to domestic Lares could include grain (spelt wheat and grain-garlands), honey cakes and honeycombs, grapes and first fruits, wine and incense.^[24] Domestic Lares or Lares Familiares could be served at any time and not always by intention: as well as the formal offerings that seem to have been their due, any food that fell to the floor during house banquets was theirs.^[25] At Compitalia, a pig was taken in celebratory procession through the streets of the vicus to be sacrificed before the Compital shrine; Dionysius describes the contribution of a honey-cake from each household for Compitalia's "solemn and sumptuous" rites as ancient tradition.^[26] A single source describes Romulus' provision of an altar and sacrifice to Lares Grundules ("grunting lares") after an unusually large farrowing of thirty piglets. In this case, Taylor conjectures the sacrifice of a pig, or possibly a pregnant sow – the most fecund offering is rewarded by greater fertility.^[27]

Lares origin stories and development

Parentage

The "mother of the Lares" (Mater Larum) is attested in the records of the Arval Bretheren and in the speculative commentaries of a very small number of literate Romans, to whom she is Mania, Larunda or elegaically, Lara, Muta (the speechless one) and Tacita (the silent one).^[28]

Varro (116 BC – 27 BC) believes her and her children originally Sabine and names her as Mania; the name is used by later Roman authors with the general sense of an "evil spirit". In the late 2nd century AD, Festus cites its use by nursemaids to terrify children. Macrobius (fl 395 - 423 AD) applies it to the woolen figurines (maniae) hung at crossroad shrines during Compitalia. These were, according to him, substitutions for ancient human sacrifice once held at the same festival and suppressed by Rome's first consul, L. Junius Brutus.^[29]

The Arval Brethren offer a sacred meal to the Mother of the Lares (cena matri Larum); in the temple of Dea Dia, they recite prayers over a sacred, sun-dried earthenware pot of puls (porridge), then throw the full pot from the temple doorway, down the slope on which the temple stands; thus, as Taylor remarks, towards the earth and is a typically chthonic offering. The Arvals invoke the Lares themselves in the obscure, fragmentary opening to the Arval Hymn (Carmen Arvale); enos Lases iuvate ("Help us, Lares").^[30] On another occasion, they offer the Matres Larum two sheep.^[31] Taylor interprets the Mater Larum as a dark or terrible aspect of Tellus (Terra Mater)

Ovid regards what may be remnants of her rites as superstitions, or folk-tradition 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 Tacita. If, as he proposes, the lemures are unsatiated and malevolent forms of Lares, then they and their mother find their way into Lemuralia, when the vagrant and malicious Lemures and (perhaps) the Larvae must be placated by midnight libations of spring-water and offerings of black beans, spat from the mouth of the paterfamilias to the floor of the domus; again, 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.^[32]

The only known mythography attached to Mater Larum is Ovid's. In his Fasti (II, 571 ff) he identifies her as a once-loquacious nymph, Lara, her tongue cut out for betrayal of Jupiter's secret amours. Lara thus becomes Muta (speechless) and is exiled from the daylight world to the underworld abode of the dead (ad Manes); a place of silence (Tacita). She is led there by Mercury and is impregnated by him en route. Her offspring – twin boys, in this poetic variant – are as silent or speechless as she. ^[33]

Household lararium in Pompeii

The Lares and their mother have been suggested as ancient Etruscan divinities; the title or forename Lars, used by Rome's Etrucan kings have been interpreted as "king", "overlord" or "leader".^{[citation needed]} Greek authors offered "heroes" and "daimones" as translations for Lares and the early Roman playwright Plautus employs a far from silent guardian Lar Familiaris where Menander's Greek original has a heroon (hero-shrine); the Lar reveals himself as the guardian of secret treasure.^[34] Plutarch's collated accounts of Rome's legendary beginnings offer glimpses of possible equivalence and confusion. In one of these, the mother of Romulus and Remus is a priestess of Vesta (goddess of the hearth) mortally sworn to chastity, seduced and impregnated but subsequently spared along with her sons. The boys are abandoned in the wild, suckled by a she-wolf (lupa) then fostered by Acca Larentia, a sacred prostitute (lupa is also Roman slang for a female prostitute).^[35] Plutarch offers a similar legend of Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, credited with the founding of the Compitalia; his virginal slave mother-to-be is impregnated by a phallus-apparition arising from the hearth,^[36] or some other divine being held to be a major deity or ancestor-hero by some, a Lar by others. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports Servius' fathering by a Lar and his later pious founding of Compitalia as Roman commonplaces during the Augustan era. The Lar seems to him an equivalent to the Greek hero; semi-divine, ancestral and protective of place.^[37][38][39]

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 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 Lar Familiaris protects the house, and familia as he has always done, and safeguards their secrets.^[40]

Tacitus counts a particular Lares shrine (a sacellum Larum) among the markers of Rome's ancient pomerium – the city's most important and sacred boundary, defined by Romulus with oxen and plough in Rome's founding myth).^[41] The ausipicia urbana (urban auspices) could be rightly taken only within the sacred area defined by the pomerium, where the presence of a Lares shrine confirms the role of Lares as protective deities of boundary and place. These Lares defend Rome from augural error (vitium).^[42]

Festus clearly identifies the Lares as "gods of the underworld" (di inferi)^[43] and Apuleius defines them as good or benevolent ancestral spirits, belonging both to the underworld and to particular places; to him, they are as distinct from the divine and eternal genius which inhabits, protects and inspires living men as they are from the malicious, vagrant lemures.^[44] These are philosophical and scholarly interpretations of extant traditions and rites. In the 4th century AD the Christian polemicist Arnobius, claiming among others Varro (116 BC – 27 BC) as his source, describes them as once-human spirits of the underworld, therefore ancestral; he also – and perhaps uniquely in the literature – categorises them with larvae (more usually identified with the lemures as dark and malevolent spirits of the restless dead).^[45][46] Notwithstanding Arnobius' later polemic, and the ambivalence attached to their maternity, the Lares remain benevolent if duly honoured. The proliferation of names attached to the Lares reflects a multiplicity of functions distributed among a single and usefully nebulous type. No traditional theology is attached to them, and very little mythography. In Cicero's day, the presence of one's domestic Lares laid claims of ownership and belonging.^[47] Over four centuries later, in the early 5th century AD, Rutilius Namatianus could refer to the tale of a famine-stricken district whose inhabitants had no choice but to abandon their Lares (thus, to desert their rat-infested houses).^[48]

Lares and their domains

Gallo-Roman Lar, Imperial period (from the "Muri" statuette collection).

The titles and domains given below are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive: some Lares appear to have had overlapping functions and changes of name.

• Lares Augusti: the Lares of Augustus, or perhaps "the august Lares", given public cult on 1st August; thereby identified with the inaugural day of Roman magistracies and with Augustus himself. Official Cult to the Lares Augusti continued from their institution through to the 4th century AD.^[49]
• Lares Compitales: the Lares of the various crossroads at which the Compitalia festival was held. Shrines were positioned at ward boundaries (usually defined by roadways and their intersections) and would at least two and possibly more Lares. The crossroad shrines were the focus of urban religious and social life, particularly among the poor and the plebian masses. Augustus instituted an additional Compital festival, dedicated to the Lares Praestitis.^[50][51]
• Lares Domestici: Lares of the house.
• Lares Familiares: Lares of the family. Possibly identical with the Lares Domestici, or becoming so.
• Lares Grundules: the "grunting Lares", supposedly given an altar and cult by Romulus when a sow produced a prodigous farrow of thirty piglets.^[52]
• Lares Patrii: Lares of the fathers, possibly equivalent to the dii patrii (deified ancestors).
• Lares Permarini: Lares who protected seafarers; also a temple to them (of which one is known at Rome's Campus martius).
• Lares Praestitis: Lares of the state or community. In the Augustan era, the Lares praestitis received cult at the state regia, next to the temple of Vesta, with whose worship and sacred hearth they were associated. They may be identical with the Lares Compitales of Augustan reform. Later, they represent Rome's "illustrious dead".
• Lares Privati
• Lares Rurales: Lares of the fields (identified as custodes agri – guardians of the fields), probably the most ancient form of Lar.
• Lares Viales: Lares of roads and those who travel them.

See also

• The Lares in Rome's Imperial cult
• Compitalia
• Genius
• Lemures
• Di Penates
• Manes
• Turan, the Etruscan love goddess

Notes

References

• Beard, M., North, J., Price, S., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, illustrated, reprint, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521316820
• Beard, M., North, J., Price, S., Religions of Rome, vol. 2, illustrated, reprint, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521456460
• Clarke, John R., The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 BC-AD 250. Ritual, Space and Decoration, illustrated, University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1992. ISBN 9780520084292
• Giacobello, Federico, Larari pompeiani. Iconografia e culto dei Lari in ambito domestico, LED Edizioni Universitarie, Milano, 2008, ISBN 9788879163743
• Lott, John. B., The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521828279
• Orr, D. G., Roman domestic religion: the evidence of the household shrines, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II, 16, 2, Berlin, 1978, 1557‑91.
• Taylor, Lilly Ross, The Mother of the Lares, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 29, 3, (July - Sept. 1925), 299 - 313.
• Weinstock, Stefan, Two Archaic Inscriptions from Latium, Journal of Roman Studies, 50, (1960), 112 - 118.
• Wiseman, T. P., Remus: a Roman myth, Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780521483667

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