The familiar Gods
An analysis of the Lares in the domestic ‘lived’ religion of the early Roman empire. 80 B.C. - 79 A.D.
Subject: domestic Roman religion, household gods, Lares, Genius, Penates, Manes ‘lived ancient religion’ and Pompeii.
Summary
The topic of this Master thesis is the analysis of domestic religion, focusing on the worship of the Lares in Pompeii, in the period between 80 B.C. and 79 A.D, using the ideas of the L.A.R. group (Lived Ancient Religion). I argue that in the study of Roman religion scholarly attention has been mainly focused on the rituals performed by city cults and not on the individual as participant and as a religious agent in his own right. The L.A.R. group, that was founded less than a decade ago, has worked on reintroducing the individual and to investigate the experiences these individuals would have felt when they took part in religious activity. Looking at Pompeii I researched different household shrine’s (Lararia) objects and imagery in different houses to research how these would have interacted with the family living in that house. I found out that these shrines would, under the right circumstances, become centers of religious experiences in the household and influence not just the family living in the house but also guests and visitors. The right circumstances could be created by religious festivals or other religious activities like performing a ritual or sacrifice in the garden or at the Lararia itself. Furthermore, I show that these domestic religious experiences are connected to the larger world and vice versa. This would make the city itself, and the gods worshipped in its streets, connected to the households and the religious activities performed inside. To conclude, the imagery and objects surrounding the household shrines in Pompeii show its importance as a religious center and activator in the house. The people worshipping at these shrines would have experienced strong emotions based on the signs they interpreted and the acts they performed. This household religion enhanced and got itself enhanced by the images, rituals and festivals performed or celebrated on the streets of Pompeii. This would make the city, as a whole, and the household more religiously active or charged and because of that increase the religious experience worshippers would have felt.
Summary...2
Abbreviations...3
Introduction...4
I. Standing of the gods...8
II. The home of the gods...16
III. Feeling at home in the city...26
Conclusion...37
Bibliography...40
Ancient sources...42
Appendix sources...43
Appendix...46
Appendix I. Map of Pompeii...47
Appendix II. House of the Vettii...48
Appendix III. House of the red walls...49
Appendix IV. House of Julius Polybius...50
Appendix V. House of Sutoria Primigenia...51
Appendix VI. House of Menander...52
Appendix VII. House of the tragic poet...53
Appendix VIII. Compitum Pompeii...54
Appendix IX. Temple of Vespasian...55
Appendix X. Belvedere altar...55
Appendix XI. Bar of Lucius Vetutius...56
Abbreviations
Introduction
The city of Pompeii in the bay of Naples was one of many minor cities in the bay that prospered from trade coming in from all over the Mediterranean Sea and the Roman empire. The city would have been filled with people, traders trying to get their hands on valuable products, travelers traveling to other parts of the empire, slaves running errands for their households, priests going to the temple to thank the gods for their blessings, and citizens, men, women and children, enjoying their everyday lives. All these people went about their days knowing that a special kind of god was watching over them. These gods did not live in heaven, or on top of a mountain or drove chariots through the sky. These gods lived beside every human being and protected them from evil. They lived in their houses, on their street corners, and on every boundary in the world watching over those who passed by them. These gods, the Lares, watched over the people of Pompeii, like they did with everybody in the empire, until the year 79 A.D. when Pompeii was lost to them, buried under the ash of the erupting Vesuvius. For more than a thousand years Pompeii slept under its blanket of ash until it was
accidentally rediscovered in 1592 by Domenico Fontana. Nowadays, thousands of people crowd the streets and squares of Pompeii anew, tourists looking at the best preserved Roman/Greek city, because of its sudden disappearance. But what about the Lares that protected the city in Roman times? They are still there in the houses, but without families to protect, and on the street corners, but without people that believe in them passing by. I want to use the archeological evidence of the Lares to learn more about the people they looked after and protected. I will dedicate this master thesis to the investigation of the Lares and the question raised by scholars in recent decades, namely, how did the ancient people experience their own religion?
In this thesis, I want to research the gods, in particular, the Lares, of this household religion and how they changed our, modern, view on Roman religion. In the past, scholars have mostly ignored the Lares and the domestic religion they represent and by so doing missed an important part of the religious experience ancient Romans experienced at home. My research question shall be: How does the concept of ‘lived ancient religion’ change our understanding of domestic, primarily looking at the Lares, religion in the Roman empire from 80 B.C. and 79 A.D.? I chose this subject because it has only been brought to the attention of historians and scholars in the past decade with the rise of the concept of ‘lived ancient religion’. ‘Lived ancient religion’ involves the idea that “religion” is understood as a spectrum of experiences, actions, and beliefs and communications hinging on human communication with super-human or even transcendent agent(s), for many, but not all societies conceptualized as ‘gods’.”1 This new approach focuses on the experience of people concerning
1 Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke, ‘Archaeology of religion, material religion, and the ancient world.’ A companion
to the archaeology of religion in the ancient world. Edited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke (Malden et al. 2015)
religious activities and is new because in the past scholars would have focused on the rituals and acts performed by the population, but not what an individual would experience during those rites. It is, therefore, a new area of investigation that can give us greater inside into Roman religion. My choice to focus on the domestic sphere is because of my own interest in how people experience religion. By looking at the domestic sphere we get a very personal view of the meaning of religion in the everyday lives of Roman citizens. I would like to reconstruct the experience people felt when performing rites in their own homes or gardens, using the imagery and items found in the houses in Pompeii. The Lares proved a perfect subject for this investigation because they are not just gods of the house itself, but they are also connected with the family that lives in that house. And because of that, each house gives a different and unique view of how different households/ families interacted with them.
I will start my research by first explaining the debate among scholars about how we must understand ancient religion in general. I will do this by looking at both ancient and modern sources. For the ancient sources, I will, for example, look to Cicero who in different works gives different opinions about religion, but also at the writings of Livy, Varro, and Marcus Cato. In the modern debate about Roman religion, I will start from the beginning of the scholarly debate in the nineteenth century and show how religious beliefs of that time obscured our understanding of ancient religion. I will also show how the academic understanding was for decades controlled by a model that only focused on the socio-political implications of religion in the cities. I will show how this model was slowly deconstructed, which led to the rise of new ideas like the ‘lived ancient religion’ research concept with its focus not on social-political factors and the rituals performed, but on the personal experiences of people participating in the worship of the gods. Then finally, I will finish up by showing how this new research concept changes the research into domestic religion and the study of the Lares. This is important because I want to show how revolutionizing and important these new lines of inquiry are in the history of the study of ancient religion. Also, this thesis will be based on the basic principles of the ‘lived ancient religion’ perspective and it, therefore, requires explanation before proceeding to interpret the experiences that come with ancient religious environments like the domestic setting.
In my second chapter, I will look at the archeological findings of domestic religion in the city of Pompeii. I will study several houses and explain what we found, in the sense of wall paintings, statues and other items, during their archeological excavation and how this can be interpreted to reconstruct ancient religion within the houses themselves. In this chapter, I will not only focus on the Lares, but I will also introduce the other domestic gods/ spirits that can be found in houses, like the Genii, Manes and the Penates. I do this to illustrate the richness of worship that took place in a house and my reconstruction would be incomplete if it only focused on the Lares. I will use all these elements to try and reconstruct the private, or at least very personal, experience a person would
have when dealing with these domestic gods connected to that person's very own household. This is important because it will help us to understand how ancient Romans viewed their own religion and what the experiences were, like emotions, thoughts, or interpretations, that came with it. In the third and final chapter, I will look at how these domestic experiences and rituals are connected to the bigger and wider world beyond the threshold of the house. In this chapter, I will look at the Lares as the guardians of street corners and the festivals that were linked with them. I will also show how the experiences in their own homes could affect the Roman Pompeiians religious activities outside of the house.
I focus on the city of Pompeii2 because it is the best-preserved city of Roman times. Most of the ancient cities uncovered have only a meter of wall left standing, while in Pompeii the walls mostly stand up to the second-floor level. This is important because most of the altars and wall paintings depicting the household gods are above a meter and are, therefore, often lost in other places.3 This, however, does not mean that I will not use other places. For example, there has been more research done about the Lares Compitales and their festival Compitalia in Rome. I will, therefore, use the knowledge from the studies of Rome and investigate how these compare with the findings in
Pompeii. Because of the fact that Pompeii is an extraordinary archaeological site we find more about domestic religion than anywhere else, but this does not mean that Pompeii is a standard Roman city and therefore we must assume that the Lares in this city are not the same as the ones in Flavian Rome, the period of the fall of Pompeii.4 The reason that I chose for the period of 80 B.C. til 79 A.D. is because this was the period that Roman influence was most present and experienced in ancient Pompeii. This was because the dictator Sulla placed many of his army veterans in the city and surrounding area in 80 B.C. and this increased the Roman influence in the region and thereby transforming the religious and city landscape.5 It is also from this period that the first Roman-style houses and the first evidence of the Lares cult were found. 79 A.D. is, of course, the year of the eruption of the Vesuvius and the end of Pompeii. When it comes to the writings of ancient authors this period gives a broad number of sources that debate the meaning of the Lares and the meaning of religion. Important to keep in mind is that both ancient and modern sources wrote in the tradition of a certain genre or with some goals in mind that affected the arguments and conclusions of their works. I will address these problems in chapter one. Domestic religion has for a long time been forgotten or ignored and therefore it is time to refocus our efforts to understand this most direct and personal part of religion. This thesis will be an attempt to do this.
2 For the map of Pompeii see appendix I.
3 Kimberly Bowes, ‘at home’ A companion to the archaeology of religion in the ancient world. Edited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke (Malden et al. 2015) 209-219, see 210-211.
4 Harriet I. Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden. Religion at the Roman street corner (Princeton and Oxford 2017) xi.
I.
Standing of the gods
In this chapter, I will describe the developments of our understanding of Roman religion as a whole and the way Romans themselves looked at their own religion. I will finish by looking at how both ancient and modern historians analyzed, studied and identified the Lares.
When we look at the treatises of ancient writers, we can see that they differed from tone when it comes to religion. For some authors, religion played an important part in their works and I will give several examples of authors below. Important to remember here is that the authors wrote in a certain genre and with certain ideas in mind. For example, Livy wrote a history of Rome to show how “discipline broke down bit by bit, morality at first foundered: how it next subsided in ever greater collapse and then began to topple headlong in ruin.”6 Virtues men succeeded in saving Rome from its demise from time to time and put Rome once again on the right track. The gods play a role to show whom these virtues men were in Livy’s story. Livy’s writings were also greatly influenced by the chaos of his own times, namely the Roman civil wars and the rise of Augustus.7 Livy’s views on religion would therefore also be influenced by his own experiences. Another example is the treatise of Marcus Cato on agriculture where he wrote about the instructions a landowner should give to his overseer concerning the proper treatment of the household Lar. He states that the first thing the owner should do when coming to the farm was bringing greetings to the Lar that protected his farm.8 Cato wrote Latin prose, but most of his writings are lost, and this instruction manual about farming is the only complete work we have of him. When it comes to his instructions about the gods it is important to remember that Cato wrote as a highly respected elite of the republic.9 Cato´s
instruction, therefore, may not have reflected reality, but may be a show of the dignity and piety that is expected of someone with his standing.10 Marcus Terentius Varro likewise starts his work on farming by not invoking the muses to help him with his writing, which was custom at the time, but he instead invoked the help of the twelve councilor gods. With this declaration, he clearly states that he does not mean the gods of the city "whose images stand around the forum, bedecked with gold", but the gods that are important for agriculture.11 Some modern scholars, however, think that Varro uses the running of a farm to describe his own ideas about running the state.12 What also must be asked is if Varro was writing about contemporary practices or referring to outdated religious practices of the past. Although we may question if the descriptions of religion in these authors works are factual or modified to suit their needs. What is a fact, is that they describe religion as being part of Roman life and there are no doubts about the existence and at times the interventions of gods in the lives of men.
6 Richard Rutherford, Classical literature. A concise history (Malden et al. 2005) 118-121. 7 Livy, Ab urbe condita 1.9-10.
8 Cato, De agri cultura 141.1-4.
9 Cato, De agri cultura. In: Cato and Varro, On agriculture. translated by William D. Hooper and Harrison B. Ash (Cambridge and London 1935) x-xiii.
10 Drew Baker, ’The villa in context,’ The classical review 65 (2015) no.2, 524-526, see 525. 11 Varo, De agri cultura 1.1.4-7.
On the other hand, we have writers, like Cicero, that are very skeptical about Roman religion in their written work. In the second book of Cicero’s De divinatione, Cicero wrote about a
conversation between himself and his brother Quintus about Roman religion. In this debate, criticism is leveled against a vital part of Roman religion, namely augury.13 He says about augury: "whose methods are not so artificial as they are superstitious"14 and he states about when they are performed that: " we never do except when the duty of doing so is imposed by a vote of the people."15 From this, it clearly seems to show that Cicero did not believe in the performing of divinations through augury. This is strange for Cicero himself was an augur and in his first book, he presents arguments that support divinations by augurs.16 So how must we understand Cicero’s different opinions on Roman religion? First of all, we must understand that religion for a long time belonged as part of politics and was therefore performed by the elites of Roman society. However, before and during Cicero’s lifetime new laws and political instability cast religion to be viewed by the Romans as a separate part of life apart from politics. By becoming a theme of its own, religion became subject for debate by people outside of the Senate and priestly colleges. A second reason was the continued increase of Roman familiarity with the Greek world and its literary tradition. In Greek philosophy the divine had been a subject of debate for a long time and Romans are getting in the second and first century B.C. more familiar with these debates. Cicero was therefore not showing his personal ideas on religion, but he was using these treatises to show that he had the skill and knowledge to apply these Greek philosophy theories onto the subject of Roman divination.17 As a matter of fact, Cicero’s De natura deorum, a work that was the basis for the debate in the De divinatione, shows this philosophical debate in a debate between Roman citizens, Cicero being among them. At the beginning of the work, Cicero sums up the different views, namely those who do not believe in the gods, those who do believe in the gods but not in their interventions in the lives of men and finally those who believe that the gods are interacting with us.18 The works of Cicero should, therefore, be seen as works that showed Cicero’s skill and knowledge of Greek literature and
philosophies and not as a standard representation of elitist, or his own ideas on Roman religion. Although, we understand nowadays that Cicero should not be taken at face value, this was however not the value given to it in many of the modern studies into Roman religion. For a long time, Cicero was the evidence for the political essence of the religion, which lost its spirituality a long time ago and had become merely a tool for the elites to control the ‘ignorant’ plebs. This was proven with quotations like: "although in the beginning augural law was established from a belief in divination, yet
13 Meaning: The foretelling of future events by watching the flight of birds. 14 Cicero, De divinatione 2.36.76.
15 Cicero, De divinatione 2.36.76.
16 For example, see: Cicero, De divinatione 1.10.16
17 Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Roman religion. Volume 1. A history (Cambridge 1998) 149-152. 18 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.1.2-2.3-5.
later it was maintained and preserved from considerations of political expediency."19 In the nineteen century, this idea was centered around Christian ideas that the Roman religion, because of the hollow spiritual/ internal beliefs and because of its superstition, fell easily when the one true religion, Christianity, was introduced into the empire. The religion was hollow and decadent and could not survive the confrontation with a real religion.20 This idea we see for example in the writing of Edward Gibbon, the father of modern Roman history, who describes how Roman religion started to fall from the time of Constantine, but in destroying this pagan religion Christianity took over some of its superstition and false beliefs. This resulted in the worship of relics and Saints, which is the protestant Gibbon way of attacking the Catholic church where this kind of worship is important even in present times. This form of corruption of Christianity, according to Gibbon, ended during the reformation by the monk Marten Luther.21 Other important historians with similar views on Roman religion were Mommsen and Wissowa. Mommsen as a Lutheran shared the views of Gibbon that Roman religion was hollow and that the Catholic church was the same. Wissowa was less racial because he was Catholic. Wissowa main focus was on trying to reconstruct the rites and religious behavior of Romans based on written sources and archeological evidence.22
In the nineteenth century, we also saw the rise of the so-called Polis-religion or civic religion model. This model has been at the center of research into Roman religion and persists even into the present time. The model emphasized the matrices in which public or civic religion was tied to, or embedded in, political and social order. Polis-religion was used to create a civic identity and in it religion functions as an instrument of power in preserving political and socioeconomic hierarchies. In other words, the elite of cities used religion, by controlling the priesthoods and cults, as a means to manipulate and control all other members of society and to create a civic identity that kept them in power. Religion was an instrument of power and nothing else. After the Second World War criticism was raised against this model. In this criticism, there was an attempt to rehabilitate the elites by claiming that they were just unknowing participants in this power system.23 This criticism did not destroy the polis-religion model, but it did change the model in a way that the emphasis on the controlling nobles lost favor -but it did not disappear completely- and the focus of scholars was aimed at the research of the rituals and communal systems of religion within a polis. Two examples of these can be found in the book of Arjan Zuiderhoek and in the works of John Scheid. In the work of Arjan Zuiderhoek, The ancient city, religion is described precisely as it is in the traditional polis-religion
19 Cicero, De divinatione 2.35.75.
20 Craige B. Champion, The peace of the gods. Elites religious practices in the middle Roman republic (Princeton and Woodstock 2017) 3-4.
21 Edward Gibbon, The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Abridged edition, edited and abridged by David Womersley (London et al.2000) 355-360.
22 John Scheid, The gods, the state, and the individual. Reflection on civic religion (Pennsylvania 2016) 10-11. 23 Champion, The peace of the gods. 2-5.
model. He describes it as a way to create a civic identity and a way for the leaders of the city, the elite, to remain in power.24 John Scheid is seen as one of the frontrunners that promoted the new religious model with a focus on the social structures and rituals of religion in the cities in antiquity.25 He stresses the ritualistic nature of ancient Roman religion and he states that the Roman religion was a social religion not linked to the individual. Religion was practiced as a group, like a city, the legion, the family etc.26
The real dismantling of the model started only in the past decade. Surprisingly it is John Scheid who wrote a book -The gods, the state, and the individual. Reflection on civic religion- about the flaws of the model. He did this in order to defend himself against critics of the civic religion model. He tries to show that his use of the model is still valid because the model protects the study from personal religious interpretation and helps interpret the organization surrounding religion, like rites and cults. He did recognize that the model had flaws. 27 He acknowledges several flaws of the model. The first one being that the model does not help us explain the complexity of ancient religion. He means that there are cults and deities that were not in the Roman pantheon and where the city elite had no influence over. Secondly, it leaves no room for other aspects of religion like domestic/ private religion. Thirdly, it does not help explain changes in the religion, like the rise of the so-called mystery cults. And fourth, it does not consider the numerous non-citizen inhabitants of a city that took part in religious rituals and festivals. Pilgrims traveled between cities across the empire to visit remote temples or religious festivals and therefore they were an anomaly for they were not part of the civic religion, yet they were religious agents. The fifth and final point I will mention is that the system did not leave room for belief and emotions. If the religion was an instrument of elitist design, as earlier historians had claimed, then they would not have believed or have faith that the rituals and sacrifices performed would actually work. Scheid shows, by the Romans own legendary past, that there were emotions and beliefs involved. He uses the legends of the Roman king Numa, successor to Romulus, to make his point, for it is told that when Numa was performing a ritual an enemy army approached and the people flocked to Numa to make him act. He replied by saying: “But I am sacrificing!28”. Scheid states that the Romans belief was like the relation of trust between client and patron. Numa did not fear the enemy coming for him for he performed a ritual well and there for the gods would show their favor to Rome.29 Champion also warns his readers about the flaws of the
civic-24 Arjan Zuiderhoek, The ancient city (Cambridge et al. 2017) 94-105.
25 Jack Wells, ‘reviewed work: An introduction to Roman religion by John Scheid, Janet Lloyed’ the history
teacher 37 (2004) no. 3, 406-407, see 406-407.
26 John Scheid, An introduction to Roman religion (Paris 1998) 18-19.
27 Scheid, The gods, the state, and the individual. 20-21. And Andrew Durdin, ‘John Scheid, The gods, the state, and the individual. Reflections on civic religion in Rome,’ History of religion 57 (2017) no. 1, 93-96, see 93-94. 28 For the quotation see: Plutarch, Numa 15.6.
model, but he also admits that many of the recent studies already take in to account the flaws of the model without completely abandoning the structure it provides for anyone studying Roman religion.30
With the growing opposition against the model of civic religion there needed to be looked at new ventures to investigate that what was neglected under the former system, as I already
mentioned above in the criticism of John Scheid. One of the groups that investigated these new areas of research was the L.A.R. group that worked from 2012 until 2017. The L.A.R. (Lived Ancient
Religion) project was “a proposal about how one might re-think the conceptualization of the vast, amorphous heterogeneous body of material that bears upon what is conventionally known as ‘the religion of the Roman Empire’.”31 This group was grounded in three challenges to existing approaches. First, they criticize the idea that all people of the empire were equally religious. Secondly, they call in to question the focus on the civic, collective and institutionalized religious practices. This is important because it leaves out groups of religion that were not collective or institutionalized, like ‘mystery-religions’, ‘oriental cults’, ‘indigenous cults’, votive religion’, and ‘funerary rites’. These groups were subcategories that here recognized but never truly understood in older models. Thirdly, the
treatment of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity as religions separate from one another while they inhabited the same world of antiquity. Because of these standing problems, the study of ancient religion has lost its cohesion with other religion studies.32 The group is not a new methodology or a general theory of religion. “It seeks to complement other approaches by framing new questions that can be posed to a wide range of different evidence, deriving primarily but perhaps not exclusively from the Graeco-Roman world.”33 One of the important tasks of the L.A.R. group is to rehabilitate the individual religious agents in a framework fixated upon ‘festivals’ and ‘collective practice’.34 The studies of the L.A.R. group have already resulted in new studies about lived religion in the Roman world. One scholar who has been a frontrunner in this new research subject is Jörg Rüpke. His book -Pantheon- is an important basis in applying the ideas of ‘lived ancient religion’ on historical and archeological evidence.35
I will now discuss the historiography of the Lares and the debate about their identity and origin.When it comes to domestic religion in the civic model it has always been seen as a
subcategory within the cities religious structures. Scheid states that the smallest social group within the polis is the family.36 What scholars, however, did never really look at was the individual within the
30 Champion, The peace of the gods. 5.
31 Janico Albrecht et al., ‘Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach’ religion (2018) 1-26, see 1 and 2.
32 Albrecht et al., ‘Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach’, 2. 33 Ibidem, 3.
34 Ibidem, 2.
35 Jörg Rüpke, Pantheon. A new history of Roman religion (Princeton and Oxford 2016). 36 Scheid, An introduction to Roman religion, 19.
family and the house. Flower´s study was “to understand religion as integral and omnipresent in ordinary Roman life at its most basic level.”37 The Lares, Flower explains, are defined in two different ways in modern scholarly work. Firstly, they are described as being the guardian deities of places and the road between them. And the second describes them as being the (potential restless) spirits of deceased family members, which would have made them underworld spirits. This unresolved debate about the nature of the Lares is mostly to blame on ancient sources for they were not clear about the meaning either. For example, Arnobius, a Christian intellectual of the third century, summarized several definitions from earlier works. He stated that the Lares are guardians of the streets and that P. Nigidius Figulus wrote that they were protectors of the house. He ends with Varro stating that they should be called Manes (spirits of the kindly dead), or gods of the air and heroes, or spirits of the restless dead (Larvae), or protective spirits (Genii).38 Arnobius was a Christian who wrote this work to show his devotion to his new faith and to attack the traditional religion so it is not an objective source. That also includes his sources for Figulus and Varro were very prominent intellectuals of their time, the first century B.C., but they were part of the same elite, intellectual debate as Cicero’s works and their definitions may, therefore, be more a show of knowledge instead of dealing with
contemporary concerns.39
Flower does not believe that the Lares are spirits of the deceased because, as she explains, the spirits of the deceased are underworld spirits and these spirits cannot freely interact with the world of the living. Also, on many occasions banquets would be held for the Lares, like during the festival of Compitalia40, and they were also part of thanksgiving by the family at supper every evening. Flower states the living did not share their meals with the restless deceased. Furthermore, the presence of shrines on every street corner and in many homes and kitchens does not fit the image of restless deceased. These deceased would have been ancestors but in the iconography, Lares are never depicted wearing honorable Roman clothing, like a toga or a military uniform, which is what you would expect if they represented the ancestors. Instead, Lares are shown wearing a short tunic, with long hair, as they danced and poured a libation of wine for a feast. Flower thinks that ancient sources try to connect the Lares to spirits of the dead, because they did not have clear mythic identities and had an archaic nature.41 Flower, therefore, believes that the Lares are gods of the hearth and protectors of the household and crossroads. As proof, she quotes a play by T. Maccius Plautus (ca. 254-184 B.C.) named Aulularia (Little pot of gold), which was performed for the first time in 195 B.C.. In the play, the main storyteller introduces himself as the Lar Familiaris who lives in the
37 Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden, ix. 38 Arnobius, Adversus Gentiles 3.41.
39 Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden, 3-4 and 6-7. 40 Further explanation of the Compitalia will follow in chapter III. 41 Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden, 9-12.
hearth and who occupied the house and protected the family living in it for four generations. The first generation hid a pot of gold in the hearth and asked the Lar to keep it hidden. The Lar did just that for the second and third generation because the two men were not worthy of it and did not respect the Lar properly. The third generation, the current paterfamilias, had a daughter who did worship the Lar with daily offerings of incense or wine and sometimes even garlands. The Lar rewards her by giving the paterfamilias the pot of gold so that he can give her a better marriage arrangement.42 To further this understanding of the Lares as deities of the hearth archeologists have looked to Bronze Age houses in Italy when the hearth held a central position in the house. In this setting, they see the hearth as the center of household religion. Archeologists argue that by Greco-Roman times when the houses became more complex and the hearth was moved to the kitchen it still kept its religious importance and became a memory of ancestral practice and of the gods associated with that ancient past. The Lares Familiaris, or an archaic version of the Lares, would have originated from the Bronze Age house.43
If we assume that the Lares Familiaris are indeed the gods of the hearth and closely
connected to the house and the family that lived under their protection, then what about the Lares Compitales that were worshipped at street shrines in the various wards of the cities. For their origin, we must look at the legendary ancient past of Rome in the time of the kings. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote that they were venerated since the time of the sixth king of Rome Servius Tullius. King Tullius had a special connection with the Lares for he was, according to legend, a child begotten by the Lares. Dionysius wrote that Tullius mother Ocrisia – who had been the queen of the Latin city Corniculum till it fell to the Romans- was a slave in the royal palace in Rome when she saw a man’s privy member in the flames of the hearth. When she informed the fifth king, Tarquinius, and his wife, Tanaquil, of what she had seen they saw it as a sign that any women that would interact with it would give birth to a superior human being. Because Ocrisia was the first to see the apparition she needed to interact with it, which she did, resulting in the birth of Tullius. Dionysius wrote in the same lines that the Romans often made sacrifices at the hearth and that the first portion of the meal was also surrendered to the flames to please the gods living in them. Furthermore, he remains unclear over the god responsible for this miracle. He names the god Vulcan as a possible father, but also gods, lesser divinities, or the tutelary deity of the house.44 Looking at the story and the remarks about Romans sacrificing at the hearth written by Dionysius I have little doubt that the Lares (Familiaris) were the ones that were responsible, in this myth, for Tullius birth. Dionysius wrote that after Tullius became king he constructed the first walls of Rome protecting the 7 hills. After this, he divided the
42 Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden, 31-35. And Plautus, Aulularia 1-39. 43 Bowes, ‘at home’, 213.
city into four regions and appointed commanders to each of them to know the amount of taxes and soldiers each region could provide. After this, he ordered that on every street the inhabitants of the neighborhood should erect chapels for the statues that stood in front of their houses. Tullius also made laws telling the people to make sacrifices to these statues every year and that each family should contribute a honey-cake for the occasion. The sacrifice should be made not by citizens, but by slaves because they would please the statues, which Dionysius calls heroes. Dionysius also wrote that the Romans of his time still performed the sacrifices each year and that they called it the Compitalia after their name for streets.45 Dionysius calling the statues heroes instead of minor deities or Lares makes it difficult to say this is the starting point of the Lares Compitales, but the Compitalia festival would, according to Dionysius, have started in this period of Roman history. It is possible that the Lares were introduced later to this festival and street religion.
I have shown that ancient sources had different views on Roman religion and I have explained how the ‘modern’ debate about religion developed over time. I explained how important the
initiatives of the L.A.R. group are for our understanding of the experiencing of Roman religion. Finally, I looked at how domestic religion fits in this debate, how we must define the Lares gods, and what the possible origins were of the two types of Lares central in this thesis. By using the ‘lived ancient religion’ perspective to study the Lares I think we can get a new and better understanding of Roman religious experience and how this affected our understanding of the Roman household and city. In the next chapter, I will look at the archeological evidence in Pompeii and what we can learn from it about the experience people had when worshipping.
II.
The home of the gods
In this chapter, I will look at several houses in the city of Pompeii to investigate how the Lares are represented in houses. I will start by introducing the different types of gods that could be
encountered in a Roman home. After this I will look at the houses and I will describe several things, namely, what their layout is, where the Lares can be found and how they are depicted or otherwise represented. In the third part of this chapter, I will look at how these images, statues, and altars should be viewed and how ancient citizens experienced them using the ideas of the LAR group.
As I already explained in the introduction of this thesis the Lares were not the only gods living in a home. Next to them lived the Penates, the Manes, and the Genii. These gods were an
indispensable part of the Roman household and Roman life. The importance of them can be clearly seen in the speech of Cicero called De Domus Sua. This speech was given to a group of priests, the pontifices, because Cicero was trying to get his house back. His house was turned into a shrine for the goddess Liberty after Cicero’s banishment in 58 B.C. by his rival Publius Clodius Pulcher.46 In this speech, he wrote ‘What is there more holy, what is there more carefully fenced round with every description of religious respect, than the house of every individual citizen? Here are his altars, here are his hearths, here are his household gods: here all his sacred rites, all his religious ceremonies are preserved. This is the asylum of every one, so holy a spot that it is impious to drag any one from it.’47 There is a lot of piety in this speech compared to the works of Cicero in chapter one, but this speech was given to priests and its goal was to make the decision of turning his house into a temple invalid. So, Cicero needed to show a bit of piety and the importance of the household gods, but this does not mean that the idea expressed by Cicero was invalid. The household gods did have an important role in the house and in Roman religious experience as I will show below.
I will now describe the different groups of deities and what their function was within the household. I will start with the Genius because we find him (or her) often in close association with the Lares. The Genius is a special kind of spirit that is born when a person is born and dies when a person draws his last breath. They are the guardian spirits of individual members of the household.48 The Genius, that is often depicted next to the Lares, represents the paterfamilias for he was responsible, or so many modern scholars believe49, for the sacrifices made to the household gods. The Genius can be recognized by his clothing for he is often depicted wearing a toga and is often depicted a bit smaller than the Lares. Second, the Penates are a group of gods that are worshipped in a house. They are often represented by little statues at the household shrine, the lararium. They had the function of protecting the store-cupboard or pantry.50 This group could differ immensely depending on where you lived. For example, in the city of Pompeii, we find that the god Bacchus, god of wine, was very popular among Pompeiian citizens. Although this god was not part of the central religion of Pompeii itself, its statues were often found in the lararia.51 This group of gods was not only regionally or socially dependent but could also have a very personal reason behind it. For example, a man was recovering from an illness after family or friends brought him a cure from the temple of Asclepius, a healing god. Then the cured man would have probably wanted to show his gratitude towards
46 Beard, North and Price, Roman religion, 1114-115. 47 Cicero, De Domus Sua 41.109
48 Valerie M. Warrior, Roman religion (Cambridge et al. 2006) 28-29.
49 For example: Alastair M. Small, ‘Chapter 13: religion in the Roman period’ The world of Pompeii. Edited by John J. Dobbins and Pedar W. Foss (New York and Oxon 2007) 184-211, see 191. and Paul Wilkinson, Pompeii.
An archeological guide (London and New York 2017) 137. 50 Warrior, Roman religion, 28-29.
Asclepius and he could buy a little wooden, terracotta, or metal statue of the god and place it in his Penates collection at the lararia in his house. This statue would remain in the household for
generations, who also could add new gods, thus creating a group of gods personally connected to the family. These Penates statues were often present in ancient Pompeii. Even in the homes of the poor, we have found Penates that were kept, because there was no room for a lararium, on a shelf for normal household equipment.52 Mary Beard states that the most popular Penates statues in Pompeii were, in order, the Lares, Mercury, Egyptian gods, mostly Isis, Venus, Minerva, Jupiter, and Hercules.53 Joanne Berry also names Bacchus, the god of wine, who was very popular in Pompeii thanks to its association with the deity Liber in southern Italy.54 The final group, the Manes, are not gods, but the honored ancestors. Remembering the ancestors, or even worshipping them was an important part of Roman household religion. When a person died it was very important that he was buried properly, because otherwise, his spirit would not join the Manes. With this proper burial came the obligation to ceremonially remember them on special days, like anniversaries of their passing, and during communal festivals of the dead, like the Parentalia (13-22 February). When deceased did not get this commemoration, they could become lemures -wandering and restless spirits- that could bring misfortune to the family.55 The lararium was the central place of worship in the house and could come in all kinds of shapes and forms. In houses of the rich we find small temple-like shrines called aedicule and in the houses of less wealthy citizens, a niche or just a wall-painting would suffice to indicate the center of worship in the house.56 These four groups, the Lares, the Genii, the Penates, and the Manes, form the center of the religious activity in and around the house and are vital in understanding the religious experience of the people living inside its walls.
I have selected six houses from the city of Pompeii that will help show the function and surroundings of the lararia and that will show what kind of images we can find near or in them. I have chosen houses that belonged to wealthier families because the evidence of household gods -lararia, statues, and wall-paintings- found here is more abundant then found in lesser houses. I have ordered the houses based on the different kind of images and objects found in them. The Romans had an ideal idea of how a house should be laid out. This ‘ideal’ Roman house would start with a doorway or entry hall (fauces), leading into a central courtyard (atrium), which was connected to the other rooms of the house and the garden. There were rooms (tablinum, alae, cubicula, and triclinia) connected to or close to the atrium. Cubicula is the bedroom, triclinia are dining-rooms, tablinum are rooms to store documents, and alae are rooms where the funeral masks of the ancestors were displayed.57
52 Mary Beard, Pompeii. The life of a Roman town (London 2008) 295. 53 Beard, Pompeii, 297.
54 Joanne Berry, The complete Pompeii. (London 2007) 190 and 191. 55 Scheid, An introduction to Roman religion, 167-169.
56 Wilkinson, Pompeii, 137.
Although this was the ‘ideal’ Roman house there were often differences in the layout what I will show with several houses. We often find a lararia in the atrium or very close to the kitchen of the house.
The first house I looked at is the house of Vettii (VI.15.1)58 which has a size of approximately 1.100 square meters. It was built and owned by two brothers, Aulus Vettius (Conviva) and Aulus Vettius Restitutus, who were freedmen that had amassed quite a bit of wealth and held some prominence for they, or at least Conviva, held an important office -Augustalis- in the local
government. What makes this house interesting is that it was built between the earthquake and the eruption of the Vesuvius and is there for a great example of a house at the end of my time period. When entering the house from the east side you come into the main atrium, to the north, there is a smaller atrium that is surrounded by the servant’s quarter and workplaces including the kitchens. The main atrium gives access to the peristyle that surrounded the rooms for entertainment or dining so this was the space where the owners received and entertained guests.59 The lararium, household shrine, can be found in the small atrium close to the kitchen, it is an aediculae type of shrine,
meaning that it looks like a small temple. In it is a painted wall with four figures representing the gods of the household. Two Lares standing on the left and right side that dance wearing short tunics and pouring a libation of wine from a ritual vessel (rhyton). They are very young and jovial looking male figures. The Genius stands in the middle of the painting representing the head of the household performing a sacrifice to the Lares. The Genius wears a toga praetexta and patrician shoes and he is pouring a sacrificial offering from a patera, the box in his left hand.60 Beneath this we see a snake slither in the grass towards a small altar with an egg on it. We are not sure what this means, but it is often presumed the snake symbolizes prosperity, fertility, and good fortune.61 Other writers believe that the snake represents the Genius.62 According to Flower, both descriptions are correct in a way. She shows that the snake(s) are often depicted separately from the Lares and Genius in a more rural landscape, but they also receive offerings and come -often- in pairs like the Lares. Flower believes that these snakes represent the Genius of the place, not of a person, that represent the land itself. The Lares and Genius represent the house built and the people living there, but the snake(s) represent the land in its natural form.63 On the fronton (or tympanum) of the aediculae there are
58 For layout House of Vettii, and photo of lararium. see Appendix II. 59 Jeffrey A. Becker, ‘Pompeii. House of Vettii’, website Khan Academy,
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/ancient-mediterranean-ap/ap-ancient-rome/a/pompeii-house-of-the-vettii (20 June 2018).
60 Small, ‘Chapter 13: religion in the Roman period’, 191. 61 Beard, Pompeii, 296-297.
62 Berry, The complete Pompeii, 207.
three symbols shown, a round plate (the patera), a knife, and the skull of a bull. These symbols are the Roman symbols for sacrificing.64
Another house is the house of the red walls (VIII.5.37)65 which was built in the middle of the first century B.C. and which underwent substantial alterations following the earthquake of 62 A.D. that were not finished yet when Pompeii was buried. The lararium can be found again in the atrium next to the entrances to the kitchen.66 In the shrine we again find a back wall painted with on it the two Lares and a Genius. The Genius is dressed in a white toga and holding a cornucopia as he pours a libation on an altar between the two, somewhat, larger painted Lares. The Lares are again dancing and holding rhyton in their hands. On the front of the shrine, there is a round altar and two snakes are shown. What is interesting about this lararium is that we found six Penates statues and a bronze lamp with the shrine. Found here were two statues of Mercury, one with clear Augustan features and the other in a much more Hellenized style, a nude Apollo, a tiny Hercules holding a club and two Lares in their standard dancing pose each holding a rhyton and patera. The different styles and various bases of the Penates show us that they are not a set together, but that they were bought or gained in different moments in time or from different places.67 This shows how Penates statues can remain in a family for generations. In the house of a priest (V.4.3) the medium of representation is reversed and the ‘Penates’ gods are painted on the wall inside the niche of the shrine and in a cupboard in an adjoining room we found statuettes of the Lares and Genius, among other statues. On the wall painting, we see Bacchus, Venus Pompeiana with Cupid, Fortuna, Jupiter, Mercury, Victoria, Hercules, and Minerva.68
A house does not always have a lararium or that is to say, archeologists have not found one. The house of Julius Polybius (IX.13.1-3)69 is one of these examples. This house is old from pre-Roman times but a pile of lime shows it was being renovated when the eruption of the volcano took place. The atrium is also proof of this pre-Roman history for at some point the current atrium wall was built in front of a door, which had functioned in the earlier lay-out of the house.70 The reason that there is no lararium may be because the house pre-dates Roman times or the owners used the traditional place to sacrifice to the Lares, namely the hearth of the house. Archeologists did find a large wall painting in the small kitchen of the house. On it we see again a ritual scene were the Genius makes an
64 Warrior, Roman religion, 29.
65 For image lararium. See Appendix III.
66 ‘House of the red walls’, website Pompeii sites, http://www.pompeiisites.org/Sezione.jsp?idSezione=1390 (19 June 2018).
67 Flower, The dancing Lares & the serpent in the garden, 50-52.
68 Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, ‘religion in the house’ A companion to Roman religion. Edited by Jörg Rüpke (Malden and Oxford 2007) 188-202, see there 199.
69 For the image of the Lares, Genius, and Juno. See Appendix IV.
70 A guide to the Pompeii excavation. Pompeii, produced on behest of: Board of cultural heritage Pompeii (2015) 125.
offering to the Lares, who, again, are placed on the left and right side of the painting. The sacrifice here is interesting because not only the Genius is making the sacrifice but also the Juno, female version of a Genius. The Juno is clothed in a blue dress and has a red veil. This clearly shows both the male head of the family and his wife, the female head of the family, making the offering on behest of the household.71 The snake is also visible here for he is wrapped around the altar where the sacrifice is being made, making him clearly part of the same ritual. Furthermore, we can also see two smaller figures in the ritual painting. One is standing close to the left Lar and is blowing on two flute-like instruments. This figure is the pipe-blower and is a common figure displayed on paintings depicting religious rituals. The other figure stands next to the couple making the sacrifice and he is a servant helping his master to perform the sacrifice. The head of the household is not the only one
responsible for the sacrifice in this picture, but his wife shares in the responsibility illustrated by the Juno figure. We, therefore, must wonder if the head of the household was the only one making sacrifices to the Lares. This house also has several mythical scenes painted on the walls, like the punishment of Dirce on the wall of the triclinium (dining room). This scene of the punishment of Dirce, the scene where he is bound to a bull, is very popular among Roman paintings and sculptures and there are several examples of it in Pompeii, like in the house of the Vettii.72 Although these mythical images are not part of my research into the Lares they are important to understanding the religious experience of the house as a whole. I will explain this later in this chapter.
The question about who is responsible for the offerings to the household gods is also raised by a wall painting in the house of Sutoria Primigenia (I.13.2)73 Here again we see a painting were a sacrifice is being made to the Lares, but what is different is that we see a complete family, men, women, and children, together witness and partake in the sacrifice. What is strange is that the location, a small kitchen, does not have the room to house that big of a group so it can not be meant as a literal witnessing of the offerings done in the house.74 The question is who is responsible for the offerings to the Lares? Is that the head of the household or the family as a whole? In the play Aurularia written by Plautus, we see the daughter of the head of the family take over the duties of caring for the Lar and that is acceptable to the Lar, he even likes her a lot and works to improve her lot in life.75 This, however, can be explained as a result of her father’s incapability to be a good paterfamilias. In Cato thesis on agriculture, he clearly states that the female housekeeper and not the groundskeeper (the man serving as a proxy of the paterfamilias when the master is away) should make offerings to the Lares on specific days, kalends, the ides, the nones, of each month and on
71 Frances Bernstein, ‘Chapter 34: Pompeian women’ The world of Pompeii. Edited by John J. Dobbins and Pedar W. Foss (New York and Oxon 2007) 526-537. See there: 534.
72 A guide to the Pompeii excavation, 125. 73 For image of family ritual. See Appendix V. 74 Beard, Pompeii, 297-298.
religious holidays.76 The groundkeeper explicitly is ordered not to join rituals except for the
Compitalia festival offering at the crossroads shrine or at the hearth.77 This shows us that women had a part in taking care of ritual acts towards the Lares. Cato’s instructions show that both males and females could perform offerings to the Lares and this negates the idea that the paterfamilias is solely responsible for the offerings to the Lares. However, Cato’s instructions are meant for when the master is away from the farm and it is therefore also plausible that the master's role was greater when present. I, therefore, believe that it was only on official days that the head, when present, had a major part in the sacrifices, but that on other days everybody in the household could make
sacrifices to the Lares. This is also logical for the Lares Familiaris are protectors of the house and of the family living in the house, this includes servants and slaves as well. It would be logical that all those falling under their protection would want to thank and honor them with an offering or prayer. The only reason we see the head of the family mostly in the paintings is because he made a sacrifice on behalf of the entire family on the official days.
The final house I will discuss is the house of Menander (I.10.4)78. This house was excavated in 1930-31 and it is one of the largest houses in Pompeii with a surface of 1.850 square meters. The house is rich in mosaics, frescoes, and furniture. The house was owned by Quintus Poppeus and was being renovated when the Vesuvius erupted. The wealth and riches of this house were well-known for robbers tried to dig themselves into the house after Pompeii was buried. They succeeded only to be buried by the collapse of their own tunnel. Their remains with their shovel and lanterns were found during the excavation. When entering the house through the entryway you come into the large atrium with to your right the lararium. However, my interest goes to a small room inside the house where another household shrine was kept.79 In this room, there is an altar and a niche in the wall. In the niche stood several busts depicting the ancestors of the family. This house had a different household shrine to worship the ancestors, also known as the Manes. The Manes, spirits of the deceased, may not have been gods like the Penates, but they were just as much a part of household religion as the other deities in the house.
The question that follows is how the people living in these houses experienced the constant confrontation with religious objects, structures, and images? not just the lararium in the house, but also the statues and paintings of religious and mythic scenes inside these houses. Annemarie
Kaufmann-Heinimann summarized the different paintings and items we can find in a domestic setting that refer to religious activities. She names wall-paintings, mosaics, sculptures, silverware, ceramics, lamps and money-boxes. Some of these are images or have images engraved with religious or
76 Cato, De agri cultura 143. 77 Cato, De agri cultura 5.3.
78 For layout and photo of Manes altar. See Appendix VI. 79 Wilkinson, Pompeii, 192-196.
mythical scenes and others have blessings written on them. She concludes that apart from the Lares and the Genius nothing in the house was really religious, but there were multi-layered decorations that refer to religion but are not religious themselves. She thinks that because the archeological findings are multi-layered, they do not have a clear religious purpose in the house and can therefore not be seen as religious objects.80 Jörge Rüpke makes the case, however, that all these items and in fact the whole house can be seen as a religious space when the right conditions are met. For
example, he talks about the placing of lamps and candles to highlight the images of gods and mythical creatures in the room you create a mystical atmosphere in which rituals could be performed and the witnesses could experience, by the play of light and shadow as if the gods themselves were watching them.81 A beautiful example can be found in Pompeii in the villa of mysteries with a room called the Dionysian mysteries. In this room, which was the triclinium (dining room), we see a wall-painting that stretches to all the walls of the room showing a festivity led by the god Dionysius (Bacchus) himself. It can be both interpreted as an initiation of a young girl into the Dionysius cult or as just an illustration of the god of wine and dining in a dining room.82 Whatever the case, both would leave an impression on any visitor. If it was really a place where people got initiated into the Dionysius cult it would, of course, have a clear and direct religious function and during these initiations, people would feel like the god himself was witness to their initiation. But even if it were only images for a dining room it could still affect the people dining in that room. Imagine it being late at night, its dark outside, and your dining with friends, drinking wine and eating food. The room is lighted with candles and the shadows of the people on the walls make different images light up as they move around. This festive atmosphere and all the figures connected to Dionysius on the wall would make you think that you here dining and feasting with the god himself. The images in the lararia and the other paintings in the house had the same effect when people were celebrating religious holidays or performing rituals. The Lares gave protection to the family and the household in a world full of bad omens and signs and people would have felt at ease thinking that the gods were literally watching over them. The people would have felt a real gratitude and bond with the Lares Familiaris and Penates for it was them who ensured that the household members could sleep steadily without any fear of evil spirits or disasters. They also ensured that the household prospered. So, the paintings in the house would not just be decoration, although they would have that function too, but in the right atmosphere of candlelight and religious activity they became part of the religion and gave the witnesses the feeling that the gods were watching them.
80 Kaufmann-Heinimann, ‘religion in the house’, 188-202, see there: 188-197 and 200-201. 81 Rüpke, Pantheon, 256-257.
Rüpke also gives another example of how space can quickly be made into a religious space by the placing of a tripod altar or offering bowl. He explains that when a tripod altar is placed in the garden and the worshippers, or just the paterfamilias, gathered around it asking for blessings, making an offering or offering a prater, the space becomes part of the ritual. A sudden, gentle gust of wind through the branches of the trees or rainclouds gathering would become signs of the gods
themselves and give the household members the feeling that the gods were either happy with their devotion or angered by some wrongdoing. An altar, moveable or standing, would be an unmistakable emblem of communication with the gods and would activate anyone passing by it to interact with it.83 When we look at the archeological evidence from Pompeii archeologists found a movable tripod in the House of the Faun (VI.12.2).84 This also means that any part of the house could be made into a religious area. When looking at the lararia Mary Beard questions if these shrines were even used to make offerings to the household gods.85 I think that the evidence does support the assumption that there were offerings being made at the lararia. This is proven by, first of all, the first house I
discussed, the House of the Vettii, the fronton of the aediculae tells us as much by the symbols that refer to the making of offerings. Secondly, the house of the red walls had an aediculae within it Penates statues and a lamp. Keeping a lamp burning as a sign of respect to the gods is also, in a way, an offering.86 Furthermore, we must not forget that the offerings to the Lares did not have to be big gestures, like sacrificing cattle, but simple things. Like Small says “A pious household would decorate the images with garlands on the kalends, ides, and nones of each month; and would offer simple sacrifices of wine, spelt and honey cakes to them.”87 When we look at the houses discussed we see that some lararia were suitable to receive offerings. The aediculae of the Vettii and the house of the red walls have enough space for a lamp or other kinds of offerings to be made there. When it comes to the images like in the house of Julius Polybius an offering needed to be made elsewhere. Here the offering could be made in the hearth or in the garden by using a tripod.
Rüpke also mentions placing a lamp nearby, like the one found in the House of the red walls, or by providing a bit of chant, prayer, or song would be appropriate. Next, to baked goods, he also mentions flowers as a way of showing thanks.88 Beard may be right in the idea that big sacrifices, like burning food, would not be done by the lararia, but there would be another place in the house that would be perfect for that, namely the hearth of the house, for that is where the Lares resided according to the legends. I would think that a servant when starting the hearth to prepare breakfast or dinner would first throw a bit of honey cake or another kind of offering into the flames to thank
83 Rüpke, Pantheon, 257.
84 Berry, The complete Pompeii, 179. 85 Beard, Pompeii, 297-298.
86 Rüpke, Pantheon, 257.
87 Small, ‘Chapter 13: religion in the Roman period’, 191. 88 Rüpke, Pantheon, 257.
the Lares that resided in them. In the article by Mark Robinson, he identifies several houses in Pompeii89 where ritual offerings were made in the garden. Several layers of ash show systemic offerings over many years of several types of grain, fruits, and animals, like pigs and roosters. Robinson concludes that these offerings were made to the household gods based on the kind of offerings and the iconography found in Pompeii. Several plants and fruits found by Robinson are also depicted in the imagery of the lararia.90 So, the lararia would trigger people passing by to interact with it and in so doing make them interact with the divinities themselves. the fact that the shrines are often placed in the atrium is also telling for anyone coming or leaving the house would pass by it and therefore be triggered to interact with it.91 The fact that the Lares are the protectors and keepers of the boundary between the house and the outside world would encourage people to interact with the lararia when they would be coming or going from the house. The lararia would have been a place in the house that had a constant religious atmosphere or significance and the people living in or visiting the household would have felt that the Lares would protect them. If a lararium would be damaged or be neglected, people would have feared that the gods would abandon them and misfortune would come to the household. This balance of feelings of joy and gratitude against the fear of abandonment would be a constant experience for the people in antiquity and it would motivate people to interact with the shrine, because you would not want to be disrespectful to the gods of your own home. The lararia had a constant presence in the houses of Pompeii and influenced the people that lived there. In this chapter, I have shown that there were several gods found inside the Roman houses. Furthermore, I have shown how these gods were present in the archeological findings of the city of Pompeii. Finally, I have explained how these findings can be used to get a sense of how people in antiquity experienced their household religion. In the next chapter, I will research how this household religious experience fitted in the bigger Roman world.
89 The house of Amarantus (I.9.11-12) and the house of Postumii (VIII.4.4-53).
90 Mark Robinson, ‘Domestic burnt offerings and sacrifices at Roman and pre-Roman Pompeii, Italy’ Vegetation
history and archaeobotany 11 (2002) no. 1, 93-100, see 94-99.
III.
Feeling at home in the city
In this chapter, I will research how the Lares and the experiences Romans felt in their homes
contributed to their experiences outside of the domestic sphere. I will start by arguing how we must understand the connection between the domestic sphere and the public sphere. Then I will look at the Lares and Genius in a more public setting and how this influenced the domestic worship and vice versa. I will finish this chapter by looking at how the other domestic gods, like the Penates, would be influenced by the temples and rituals in the public sphere.
To understand the experiences felt in the public sphere I must first explain how separated or privately the domestic sphere was in regards to the public sphere. What is important to remember is that our idea of privacy is different from the way Romans thought of it. Our idea of privacy comes from the nineteenth century when work and home became separated from one another and the private home became the idea of a space almost completely closed off from the outside world. The outside world could not disturb the private space unless it was allowed entry. Before this time people often combined living and working space together and the house was, therefore, part of the public domain with only specific rooms offering privacy. This would also be the case for Roman citizens and
houses.92 Roman houses have the reputation of being very open for the outside world. People passing by could see right into the atrium and sometimes get a glimpse of what laid beyond its walls, but it was a false openness. Painted walls and strategically placed columns blocked the eyesight of the visitor and would have forced him to enter the open atrium if he wanted to see more and expose himself to the servants or owner of the house. Visitors could only gain a certain amount of entry into the house depending on what kind of visitor you were. If you were a longstanding friend you could be allowed into almost every room, but if you were a client or acquaintance who came to discuss some business you would be led to the study, garden or any other suitable location of the owner’s house. So, you would not be allowed entry into the most private parts of the residence.93 Another group that the family of a house had to deal with were the servants themselves. How Romans viewed their own servants, often slaves, with regard to their privacy is a difficult question with no right answer. In some cases, they would have been thought of as part of the family or at least part of the household. This would be, for example, in cases were the servant worked for the family for years and was loyal. Such a servant would be allowed in any room at any time. However, if the servants were numerous, like on a big farm, their owners would not have a personal relationship with all of them. The owner would have a couple of servants that he trusted and the rest would not be allowed to move freely in the house. These servants would have been limited to the servant quarters and the rooms they had tasks in.94 Mary Beard adds to this description of a Roman house the placement of furniture and other household objects. She first argues that doorways that gave a viewer a glimpse of the garden could easily be closed off from view by wooden shutters. Secondly, she argues that the standard layout and purpose of a house section could have been very different if you look at the furniture placed there. She refers here to findings in Herculaneum were chairs and even a bed have been found in the atrium. Based on these findings she stated that the function of the atrium, in this case, was more than just a point of entry.95 Keeping this in mind we can still see that the Roman house had a different kind of privacy then modern houses provide, but the standard assumptions about the function of certain parts of the house may differ depending on the findings within.
The private and public spheres are, therefore, very much intertwined within the house and the household itself. This fact influences greatly the meaning of the location of the lararia. This is best seen in the house of the tragic poet (IV.8.3) in Pompeii.96 This house has a very long and narrow
92 Mark Grahame, ´Public and private in the Roman house, the spatial order of the casa del Fauno’ Domestic
space in the Roman world. Pompeii and beyond, edited by Ray Laurence and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Dexter
1997) 137-164, see 135-139.
93 Grahame, ´Public and private in the Roman house, the spatial order of the casa del Fauno’, 140-142, 145 and 157-161.
94 Grahame, ´Public and private in the Roman house, the spatial order of the casa del Fauno’, 150-157. 95 Beard, Pompeii, 88-90.
