Lararium

Roman religion did not live only in temples. Every household kept its own cult, and the lararium was its furniture: a shrine to the Lares familiares, the twinned dancing guardians of the family and its place; the Penates, protectors of the store cupboard whose name comes from the inner part of the house; and the genius, the generative spirit of the head of the household, often painted between the Lares with veiled head and offering dish.

Offerings were small and constant. Portions of the meal, spelt cakes, incense, wine and garlands were given at the shrine, with particular attention on the Kalends, Nones and Ides of each month and at the family's thresholds: a bride's first entry into the house, a son's coming of age, when the bulla worn in childhood was dedicated to the Lares, a safe return from a journey. Slaves and freedmen took part in the household cult, and the festival of the Lares of the crossroads, the Compitalia, carried the same devotion out into the neighborhood shrines where properties met.

Writers from Cato to Ovid attest the cult's ordinariness; it needed no priest beyond the head of the household. That domestic constancy is why historians treat the lararium as the layer of Roman religion that persisted longest and mattered most to most people, whatever happened in the great public temples of the state.

Most of what is known about how lararia actually looked comes from the cities buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE. Pompeii and Herculaneum preserve hundreds of examples across the whole social range: aedicula shrines like miniature temples raised in fine atria, arched niches cut into kitchen walls, and painted panels where the shrine was only an image. Their placement is itself evidence. Many stand in kitchens and service quarters, near the hearth, where the household's slaves did much of the daily tending.

The iconography is remarkably stable. Two Lares flank the scene in short belted tunics, dancing with drinking horns raised; between them stands the genius of the householder, togate and veiled, pouring a libation; below, one or two crested serpents glide toward a painted altar of offerings. The serpents are usually read as protective spirits of the place, and the eggs, pine cones and fruit painted on the altars record the kinds of offerings made in fact.

Harriet Flower's study of the Lares emphasizes what the paintings imply: a religion of place and household rather than of doctrine, renewed by small daily gestures rather than creeds. After the shrines fell out of use their form survived oddly well; the niche with its lamp and images has an afterlife in Mediterranean domestic devotion that any traveler can still recognize.