The Lares were the guardian spirits of the Roman household, tended daily at a small shrine called the lararium set into a wall of the house, usually near the hearth or the entrance. A family's own Lares Familiares were shown as a pair of youthful dancing figures, tunics belted high, one hand raised with a drinking horn, the other holding a shallow dish, flanking a larger figure of the household's Genius, its guiding spirit. Every meal owed the Lares a small offering, a scrap of food set aside before the family ate, along with wine, incense and garlands on special days.
The cult reached beyond the house. Augustus reorganized the crossroads shrines of Rome as the Compitalia, dedicating them to the Lares Compitales, guardians of the neighborhood where several households' boundaries met, tended by freedmen appointed as magistrates of the local shrine. The state itself kept Lares Praestites, guardians of the city of Rome as a whole, distinct from any single household's Lares.
Where the Lares came from is not settled. Some ancient sources call them deified ancestors, ghosts of the dead who had become guardians of their descendants' homes; others treat them as spirits of place, tied to the land rather than to any lineage, closer in kind to the numen of a spring or a grove. What is not disputed is how long the cult lasted. Household shrines to the Lares are attested from the early Republic through the fall of the Western Empire, one of the most continuously documented private cults in Roman religion.