Lares

Lares (pronounced: ˈlɑːriːz, singular: Lar) – or archaically, Lases – were guardian deities]] in ancient Roman mythology and religion. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been guardians of the hearth, fields, boundaries or fruitfulness, hero-ancestors, 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 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. As a result of these associations, Lares are sometimes categorised as household gods 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 (vici) were housed in the crossroad shrines (Compitales) which served as a focus for the religious, social and political life of their local, overwhelmingly plebeian communities. Their cult officials included freedmen and slaves, otherwise excluded by status or property qualification from most administrative and religious offices.
Compared to Rome's major deities, the scope and potency of Lares were limited but they were important, peculiarly Roman objects of cult. Archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life throughout the Republic and empire. 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 4th century CE onwards, unofficial cults to Lares persisted until at least the early 5th century CE.
== Origins and development ==
Archaic Rome's Etruscan neighbours practiced domestic, ancestral or family cults very similar to those offered by later Romans to their Lares.Ryberg, pp. 10 - 13: a wall painting at the Tomba dei Leopardi, at Etruscan Tarquinni, shows offerings are made to Lares-like figures, or di Manes (deified ancestors) in a procession preparatory to funeral games. A black-figured Etruscan vase, and Etruscan reliefs, show the forms of altar and iconography used in Roman Lares-cult, including the offer of a garland crown, sacrifice of a pig and the representation of serpents as a fructifying or generative force. Ancient Greek and Roman and authors offer "heroes" and "daimones" as translations of "Lares"; the early Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) employs a Lar Familiaris as a guardian of treasure on behalf of a family, as a plot equivalent to the Greek playwright Menander's use of a heroon (as an ancestral hero-shrine).Hunter, 2008. Weinstock proposes a more ancient equivalence of Lar and Greek hero, based on his gloss of a 4th-century BCE Latin dedication to the Roman ancestor-hero Aeneas as Lare (Lar).Weinstock, 114-118.
No physical Lar images survive from before the Late Republican era, but literary referencesSuch 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 thirty. Their development as paired divinities may have arisen through the influences of Greek religion – in particular, the heroic twin Dioscuri – and the iconography of Rome's semi-divine founder-twins, Romulus and Remus. Domestic Lares statues from the early Imperial era show only minor stylistic variations from a common type; 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). Carved representations of Lares on Compitalia shrines of the same period show 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.
==Lares and their domains==
Lares belonged within the "bounded physical domain" under their protection, and seem to have been as innumerable as the places they protected. Some appear to have had overlapping functions and changes of name. Some have no particular or descriptive name: for example, those invoked along with Mars in the Carmen Arvale are simply Lases (an archaic form of Lares), whose divine functions must be inferred from the wording and context of the Carmen itself. Likewise those invoked along with other deities by the consul Publius Decius Mus as an act of devotio before his death in battle are simply "Lares". The titles and domains given below cannot therefore be taken as exhaustive or definitive.
*Lares Augusti: the Lares of Augustus, or perhaps "the august Lares", given public cult on the first of August, thereby identified with the inaugural day of Imperial Roman magistracies and with Augustus himself. Official Cult to the Lares Augusti continued from their institution through to the 4th century CE.Beard et al, 185-6, 355, 357. They are identified with the Lares Compitalicii and Lares Praestites of Augustan religious reform.Lott, 116 - 117.
*Lares Compitalicii (also Lares Compitales): the Lares of local communities or neighbourhoods (vici), celebrated at the Compitalia festival. Their shrines were usually positioned at main central crossroads (compites) of their vici, and provided a focus for the religious and social life of their community, particularly for the plebeian and servile masses. The Lares Compitalicii are synonymous with the Lares Augusti of Augustan reform. Augustus' institution of cult to the Lares Praestites was held at the same Compitalia shrines, but on a different date.Beard et al, 139.Lott, 115 - 117, citing Suetonius.
*Lares Domestici: Lares of the house, probably identical with Lares Familiares.
*Lares Familiares: Lares of the family, probably identical with the Lares Domestici.
*Lares Grundules: the thirty "grunting Lares", supposedly given an altar and cult by Romulus when a sow produced a prodigous farrow of thirty piglets.Taylor, 303, citing the 2nd century BCE annalist Cassius Hemina.
*Lares Militares: "military Lares", named by Marcianus Capella as members of two cult groupings which include Mars, Jupiter and other major Roman deities.Marcianus Capella, 1.45 ff. Palmer (1974) interprets the figure from a probable altar-relief as "something like a Lar Militaris": he is cloaked, and sits horseback on a saddle of panther skin.Robert EA Plamer, Roman religion and Roman Empire: five essays, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974, p. 116.Limited preview available via googlebooks:
*Lares Patrii: Lares "of the fathers", possibly equivalent to the dii patrii (deified ancestors) who received cult at Parentalia.
*Lares Permarini: Lares who protected seafarers; also a temple to them (of which one is known at Rome's Campus martius).
*Lares Praestites: Lares of the city of Rome, later of the Roman state or community; literally, the "Lares who stand before", as guardians or watchmen. They 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 as Lares Augusti) should probably not be considered identical. Their local festivals were held at the same Compitalia shrines, but at different times.Lott, 116 - 117.
*Lares Privati
*Lares Rurales: Lares of the fields, identified as custodes agri – guardians of the fields – by Tibullus.Tibullus, 1, 1, 19 - 24. See also Cicero, De Legibus, 2. 19, for reference to Lares as field-deities.
*Lares Viales: Lares of roads and those who travel them.
==Domestic Lares==
Traditional Roman households owned at least one protective Lares-figure, housed in a shrine along with the images of the household's penates, genius image and any other favoured deities. Their statues were placed at table during family meals and banquets. They were divine witnesses at important family occasions, such as marriages, births and adoptions, and their shrines provided a religious hub for social and family life.The painted Lares and genius at the "House of the Red Walls" in Pompeii shared their quarters with bronze statuettes of Lares, Mercury, Apollo, and Hercules: see Kaufmann-Heinimann, in Rüpke (ed), 200.
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 (bailif).Allison, P., 2006, The Insula of Menander at Pompeii, Vol.III, The Finds; A Contextual Study Oxford: Claredon Press. Individuals who failed to attend to the needs of their Lares and their families should expect neither reward not good fortune for themselves. In Plautus' comedy Aulularia, the Lar of the miserly paterfamilias Euclio reveals a pot of gold long-hidden beneath his household hearth, denied to Euclio's father because of his stinginess towards his Lar. Euclio's own stinginess deprives him of the gold until he sees the error of his ways; then he uses it to give his virtuous daughter the dowry she deserves, and all is well.Plautus, Aulularia, prologue: see Hunter, 2008.
Care and cult 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: 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.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 thirty 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."
===Domestic shrines to the Lares===
During the early Imperial period, household shrines acquired the generic name, lararia (s. lararium). The term was derived from Lar, probably due to the domestic ubiquity of Lares. Not all such shrines need house Lares figures but of those that did, Pompeian shrine paintings are thought to show a typical layout: paired Lares flank a genius or ancestor-figure, who wears a toga in the priestly manner prescribed for sacrificers. Positioned beneath this trio of figures is a serpent, which represents the fertility of fields or the principle of generative power. Arranged around or within the whole are representations of sacrificial essentials such as bowl and knife, incense box, libation vessels and parts of sacrificial animals.
Household shrines, with or without a Lar figure or two, could be sited in virtually any room of any house; bedrooms, private rooms of uncertain purpose and working areas such as kitchen and stores. The Lares figures and shrines of wealthy households are often, though not exclusively found in the servant's quarters, and resemble those found in households of more modest means: small Lar statuettes set in wall-niches, sometimes merely a tile-support projecting from a simply painted background."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 the poet 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 atrium, 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 a simple, traditionally Roman affair, 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 1.3m 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. 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: Claredon 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 "semi-public" 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.
== Lares and the Compitalia==
The city of Rome was protected by a Lar, or Lares, housed in a shrine (sacellum) on the City's ancient, sacred boundary (pomerium).Tacitus, Annals, 12.24. Each Roman vicus (pl. vici – administrative districts or wards) had its own communal Lares, housed in a permanent shrine at a central crossroads of the district. These Lares Compitalicii were celebrated at the Compitalia festival (from the Latin compitum, a crossroad) just after the Saturnalia that closed the old year. In the "solemn and sumptuous" rites of Compitalia, a pig was led taken in celebratory procession through the streets of the vicus then sacrificed to the Lares at their Compitalia shrine. Cult offerings to these Lares were much the same as those to domestic Lares; in the late Republican era, Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the contribution of a honey-cake from each household as ancient tradition.Lott, 31: Dionysius claims the Compitalia contribution of honey-cakes as an institution of Servius Tullius. 
 
The Compitalia itself was explained as an invention of Rome's sixth king, Servius Tullius, whose servile origins and favour towards plebians and slaves had antagonised Rome's ruling Patrician caste and ultimately caused his downfall: he was said to have been fathered by a Lar or some other divine being, on a royal slave-girl.The same institution was also credited to King Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius' predecessor and paterfamilias – though not, by all accounts, his birth-father). Other candidates for Servius' paternity include a disembodied phallus that materialised at the royal hearth. 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 plebians, but freedmen and slaves, to whom "even the heavy-handed Cato recommended liberality during the festival".Lott, 35, citing Cato, On Agriculture, 5.3. Dionysius' explains it thus:
:... the heroes [Lares] looked kindly on the service of slaves.Dionysius understands the function of the Lar as equivalent to that of a Greek hero; an ancestral spirit, protector of a place and its people, possessed of both mortal and divine characteristics. 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.Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 4.14.2-4 (excerpt), Trans. Cary, Loeb, Cambridge, 1939: cited in Lott, 31. By "badges of servility" Dionysus seems to have meant distinctive slave-clothing; the slaves who ministered to the Lares were dressed as freedmen for the occasion.
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 85–82  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 BCE the games at least were suppressed as "disorderly".Lott, 28–51.
===Lares and Augustan religious reforms===
The princeps Augustus reformed Compitalia and subdivided the vici. From 7  BCE a Lares' festival on 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. Statues representing the Genius Augusti were inserted between the Lares of the Compitalia shrines.Duncan Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 1, Brill Publishers, 1991, pp. 82 - 83. 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, local, "street level" aspect of cult to living emperors.Lott, 107–117, points out that "Augusti" is never used to refer to private Julian religious practices. He finds unlikely that so subtle a reformist as Augustus should claim to restore Rome's traditions yet high-handedly replace one of its most popular cults with one to his own family Lares: contra Taylor (whose view he acknowledges as generally accepted): limited preview available via googlebooks: (accessed 07 January 2010). For the function of Imperial cult at "street level" via the reformed Compitalia, see Duncan Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, volume 1, Brill Publishers, 1991, p 82. 
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.Beard et al, 184–186. The Compitalia reforms were ingenious and genuinely popular; they valued the traditions of the Roman masses and won their political, social and religious support. 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.Beard et al, 355. 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.Lott, 174.
Augustus officially confirmed the plebian-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  BCE 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.
== Lares origin myths and theology ==
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). Her children are invoked by the obscure, fragmentary opening to the Arval Hymn (Carmen Arvale); enos Lases iuvate ("Help us, Lares").Taylor, 299. She is named as Mania by Varro (116–27  BCE), who believes her an originally Sabine deity. The same name is used by later Roman authors with the general sense of a bogey or "evil spirit".In the late 2nd century CE, Festus cites mania as a name used by nursemaids to terrify children. Much later, Macrobius (fl. 395–423 AD) 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, Lucius Junius Brutus.Taylor, 302: whatever the truth regarding this sacrifice and its abolition, the gens Junii held ancestor cult during Larentalia rather than the usual Parentalia. 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. Lara thus becomes Muta (the speechless one). Mercury leads her to the underworld abode of the dead (ad Manes); in this place of silence she is Tacita (the silent one). En route, he impregnates her. She gives birth to twin boys as silent or speechless as she. In this context, the Lares can be understood as "manes of silence" (taciti manes).Wiseman, 2-88 & 174, Note 82: cf Ovid's connections between the lemures and Rome's founding myth. Remus is murdered by Romulus or one of his men just before or during the founding of the city. Romulus becomes ancestor of the Romans, ascends heavenwards on his death (or in some traditions, simply vanishes) and is later identified with the god Quirinus. Murdered Remus is consigned to the oblivion of the earth and - in Ovid's variant - returns during the Lemuralia, to haunt and reproach the living; wherefore Ovid derives "Lemuria" from "Remuria". The latter festival name is otherwise unattested but Wiseman observes possible connections between the Lemuria rites and Remus' role in Rome's foundation legends. While the benevolent Lar is connected to place, boundary and good order, the Lemur is fearsomely chthonic - transgressive, vagrant and destructive; its rites suggest individual and collective reparation for neglect of due honours, and for possible blood-guilt; or in the case of Romulus, fratricide. For Ovid's Fasti II, 571 ff (Latin text) see the latinlibrary.com Taylor, 301: citing "Mania" in Varro, Lingua Latina, 9, 61; "Larunda" in Arnobius, 3, 41; "Lara" in Ovid, Fasti II, 571 ff: Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1, 7, 34-35; Festus, p115 L. 
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 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. 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.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 (accessed 06 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 BCE, Plautus' Lar Familiaris 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; no traditional, systematic theology attaches to them. These limitations allow their development as single, 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 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 CE the Christian polemicist Arnobius, claiming among others Varro (116–27 BCE) 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 larvae.Arnobius, Adversus nationes, 3.41.Taylor, 299-301: citing Martianus Capella, II, 162. The ubiquity of Lares seems to have set considerable restraints on Christian participation in Roman public life, and in the 3rd century CE, 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 CE, 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 (accessed 06 January 2010)
== See also ==
*Genius
*Di Penates
*Manes
== 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.
*Rüpke, Jörg (Editor), A Companion to Roman Religion, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, ISBN 9781405129435
*Ryberg, Inez Scott, Rites of the State Religion in Roman Art, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Vol. 22, University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome, 1955, pp. 10 – 13.
*Taylor, Lilly Ross, The Mother of the Lares, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 29, 3, (July - Sept. 1925), 299 - 313.
*Waites, Margaret C., The Nature of the Lares and Their Representation in Roman Art, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 24, No. 3 (July - Sept., 1920), 241 - 261.
*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
*Hunter, Richard, On Coming After, Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception, Berlin, New York (Walter de Gruyter) 2008, pp. 612–626.
Category:Roman gods