Lares

Summary

The Lares are small Roman gods, each guarding a particular place: the household Lar guards the house and its people, the Lares of the crossroads guard the meeting of streets in each quarter, the Lares of the road receive offerings by the roadside, and the Guardian Lares stand on the city walls. Images of the household Lar stood by the hearth in a small shrine called the lararium.

Ovid tells the birth of the Lares of the crossroads. A river nymph named Lara could not keep quiet; her father, the river Almo, often told her to hold her tongue, and she never did. Jupiter was pursuing the nymph Juturna, and he gathered the nymphs and asked them to stop her from fleeing into the water; Lara went and told Juturna, then went to Juno and told her that her husband loved Juturna. Jupiter in anger tore out her tongue and ordered Mercury to lead her to the land of the dead, the place for the silent. On the way they passed a grove, and Mercury desired her and took her while she tried in vain to speak with soundless lips. She conceived and bore twins, the Lares who guard the crossroads and keep watch over the city.

The household Lar speaks for himself at the start of Plautus's comedy The Pot of Gold: I am the Lar of this family; I have lived in this house for many years and guarded it for the present owner's father and grandfather. The grandfather buried a treasure of gold with me in the middle of the hearth and begged me to keep it for him; he died without showing it to his son, out of greed. I watched to see whether the son would honour me more than his father had, and he honoured me less every year, so I did the same to him, and he too died. The present owner has a daughter who prays to me every day with incense or wine and brings me garlands, and for her sake I have let her father find the treasure, so that he can give her a dowry.

A king of Rome came from the household Lar. Pliny tells how, in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, the shape of a male organ appeared in the ashes of the palace hearth; the captive Ocrisia, who was sitting there, rose pregnant and bore Servius Tullius, who became king. People saw a flame playing about the child's head as he slept and said that the household Lar was his father, and this, he says, is why the crossroads games of the Lares were instituted. Ovid tells the same story but makes the father Vulcan. Dionysius of Halicarnassus says Servius Tullius had the people of each quarter build shrines in their streets, ordered each family to bring a honey cake to the yearly feast, and had slaves, not free men, serve the sacrifice; in his own day the Romans still kept this feast, the Compitalia, a few days after the Saturnalia, and took the marks of servitude off their slaves for it.

When the farm owner arrived at his country house, Cato writes, he greeted the household Lar first and then went round his land. The housekeeper cleaned the hearth every day, put a garland on it on the Kalends, Nones and Ides of each month and on feast days, and prayed to the household Lar as far as her means allowed. The overseer could perform no rite except at the Compitalia at the crossroads or at the hearth.

The idea their stories turn on is that the Lar belongs to the place, not to the person. The household Lar stays in the house when its people die and their children come after them; he gives to the one who honours him and withholds from the one who neglects him. The Lares of the crossroads gather the houses of a quarter at the meeting of their streets, where neighbour and neighbour bring offerings and slaves serve the sacrifice. In Ovid's story they are the sons of Mercury, who leads souls and travels the roads.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The singular is Lar, the plural Lares. The Roman essay in this project reads it as "the house", and Latin itself uses lar for home and dwelling: one "returns to his lar", to his house. Varro says the name was once Lases, with s; the s between vowels later became r, so the base is Las-. We propose on the method that it is Arabic lātha. Lane gives lātha al-dār, "he kept to the house", and lātha bihi, "he took refuge in him; had recourse to him for protection or concealment", the same as lādha, the th standing in for dh. A malāth is a refuge, as in "he is an excellent refuge for guests", and also a noble chief whom people go round and seek out. These are all the Lar's works: he keeps to the house and does not leave it, his household takes refuge in him, and the Etruscans called a lord Lar. From lādha comes the phrase lādha al-ṭarīq bi-l-dār, "the road reached the house, or went round it", and that is where the Lares of the roads and crossroads stand.

Linguistic Root

Varro says that usage changed many old words, as people came to say Lares where it had been Lases. Latin s between vowels became r at an early date, as the Latin grammars record, so the r of the name is not original: it was s. The Latin table of the Juthoor sound laws gives Arabic th as Latin t, s or f, so the th of lātha becomes the s of Lases. The long ā of lātha answers the long a of Lār.

The Semitic essay has other readings: Lar as "house", which the essay says comes from the Latin; līra as "the divine dwelling"; and a Hebrew form meaning "light". The first is right in Latin, since lar does mean the house, but it explains the word by itself. The Hebrew form is not in the dictionary; the Hebrew for lamp is nēr, with n.

The Penates

The Romans often name the Penates with the Lares. They are the gods of the store and of the inside of the house, and the Latin dictionary takes their name from penus, the food store, of the same family, through the sense of a storehouse or inner chamber, as penes, "in the keeping of", and penetro, "to go within"; the other Roman essay gives the same derivation. The Semitic essay reads them from Arabic ibn, "son", or from a Hebrew pan, "bread". The Hebrew dictionary gives pen as "lest", and the Hebrew for bread is leḥem. So the name of the Penates still has no Arabic reading that holds, and its Latin sense, the store and the inside of the house, is the one the texts support.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Penates leave Troy

In the Aeneid the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas on the night Troy falls and tells him: Troy entrusts to you her holy things and household gods; take them with you and seek for them the great city you will found after wandering the sea. Then he brings out of the inner shrine the fillets, Vesta and the undying fire. Aeneas then asks his father Anchises to carry the household gods, since he has come from battle and may not touch them until he has washed in running water. In Crete the Penates stand before Aeneas in his sleep, in the moonlight, and tell him that Apollo has sent them, and that his land is not Crete but the land the Greeks call Hesperia, Italy.

The Penates return to Lavinium

Dionysius tells how, when Ascanius built Alba, he moved there the images of the gods his father had brought from Troy and set them in an inner sanctuary; in the night they went back to their old pedestals in Lavinium, though the doors were shut and the roof unharmed. They were moved again and returned again, so the people left them where they were and sent six hundred men with their households to live in Lavinium and serve them. He says the Romans call them Penates, and that Greeks render the name as gods of the fathers, of birth, of possessions, of the inner room, or of the courtyard. He describes a temple of theirs in Rome on the Velia, with two seated youths holding spears.

The emperor's Lares

Ovid says the city has a thousand Lares, together with the Genius of the leader who handed them over to the quarters, so that the quarters worship three gods. Suetonius says Augustus revived the Compitalia and ordered the Lares of the crossroads to be crowned twice a year with spring and summer flowers. So the emperor's name and Genius came to be honoured at the crossroads beside the Lares of the quarter.

Symbolic Reading

The other Roman essay in this project reads the Lares and Penates as the household's economic order. The Lares are "guardians of the place", ancestral spirits that protect the house, and honouring them affirms the family's right to its inherited property across the generations. The Penates are "spirits of the store", guardians of provisions, and honouring them affirms that storing food is the basis of the family's survival. Each family has its own Lares and Penates, its own property and stores, and the state has public Lares and Penates, its granaries and treasury. Plautus's play supports this reading from inside the text: the household Lar keeps the family's gold under the hearth and decides to whom it is given.

The structural essay makes Roman household worship a likeness of Semitic household worship, pairs the Lares and Penates with the teraphim, the household idols, and says that in both the god is not far off in the sky but the household genius, the jinnī who lives in the corners of the house and guards its hearth, the centre of the house.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Genesis, Rachel steals her father Laban's teraphim when she leaves with Jacob, hides them in the camel's saddle and sits on them while her father searches the tent. This is the comparison the structural essay draws: small gods belonging to one particular house, which the family carries when it moves, as Anchises carried the Penates out of Troy.

The father of the Lares in Ovid is Mercury, whom the Romans identified with Hermes, guide of travellers and leader of souls to the underworld, so his sons guard the meeting of roads. The fire at the centre of the house joins the Lar with Vesta and Hestia: the Lar's images stand by the hearth, and the hearth for Vesta is the centre of house and city. The comparison of Janus and threshold guardians sets the Roman door-keeper beside the gate guardians of Mesopotamia; the Lar guards the inside beyond the door.

Cato gives the farm's slaves an extra wine ration at the Compitalia and at the Saturnalia, so the feast of the Lares is one of the feasts of the rural year, as in the agricultural year and human life. Cato 57.

Historical Context

The Metropolitan Museum in New York holds small bronze statuettes of Lares from the first and second centuries CE, among them a dancing Lar 11.1 cm high from the first century, accession number 96.9.300, and another from the early first century, 19.192.50. These are the figures that stood in the lararium by the hearth.