The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner

by Harriet I. Flower

Overview

The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods. These shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by slaves and freedmen, for whom the lares cult provided a unique public leadership role. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated book, the first to focus on the lares, Harriet Flower offers a strikingly original account of these gods and a new way of understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion.

Weaving together a wide range of evidence, Flower sets forth a new interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. She makes the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have argued, but rather benevolent protectors—gods of place, especially the household and the neighborhood, and of travel. She examines the rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted alongside lares in paintings of gardens. She also looks at Compitalia, a popular midwinter neighborhood festival in honor of the lares, and describes how its politics played a key role in Rome’s increasing violence in the 60s and 50s BC, as well as in the efforts of Augustus to reach out to ordinary people living in the city’s local neighborhoods.

A reconsideration of seemingly humble gods that were central to the religious world of the Romans, this is also the first major account of the full range of lares worship in the homes, neighborhoods, and temples of ancient Rome.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691175003
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/26/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	440
Sales rank:	558,541
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Harriet I. Flower is professor of classics at Princeton University. She is the author of Roman Republics (Princeton), The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture, and Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. She is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

VARRO HESITATES ...

For the Romans, the greatest of their antiquarians was the first-century Varro ...

— BEARD, NORTH, AND PRICE 1998, 8

It is time now to turn with all due caution to the antiquarian texts and to see what they have to tell us about lares. Unfortunately, but hardly surprisingly, their explanations tend to be contradictory, confusing, and sometimes plainly at odds with older, more direct evidence. For example, Censorinus, writing a book about the birthday (de Die Natali) in the early third century AD, records an opinion of many earlier authors, including especially the scholar of law and religion Granius Flaccus (first century BC) in a work on prayer formulas that he had dedicated to Julius Caesar:

Eundem esse genium et larem multi veteres memoriae prodiderunt, in quis etiam Granius Flaccus in libro, quem ad Caesarem de indigitamentis scriptum reliquit.

Many ancients handed on the tradition that a genius and a lar are the same, among whom (is) also Granius Flaccus in a book dedicated to Julius Caesar, which he wrote about the names (and rituals) of the traditional gods (that is, those recognized by the pontifices in their technical writings).

(Censorinus de Die Natali 3.2)

The notion that the lar and the genius are the same type of deity is at variance with nearly all our other evidence. A clear distinction between the two deities is demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by the iconography of the many paintings from Campania that depict them together but as two quite differently rendered divinities, who are honored in different settings and with separate, distinct gifts.

As Censorinus himself goes on to show in detail in his birthday book, the genius is closely associated with each individual person, appearing at a birth and leaving the world at death, which is not at all the case with the lares. It is highly suggestive, therefore, that he chooses to cite a commonly held view for which he even provides a source citation that is so completely at variance with the main argument of his own book about births and birthdays. Censorinus' strategy as an author includes such scholarly asides that he thinks his readers will be interested in. His purpose is variety and learning, not a strictly persuasive and logical argument for accepted or even acceptable doctrine. Rather he wants the reader to be aware that he has read widely and is correcting common mistakes. Citing a famous authority for an opposing view serves, therefore, to enhance Censorinus' own self-presentation as a scholar and expert.

Meanwhile, much debate, both ancient and modern, has hinged on a famous passage in Arnobius (ca. 290s AD, writing about 50 years after Censorinus), a learned convert to Christianity, whose books of attack on traditional religious practices (Adversus Gentiles) were specifically designed to demonstrate his allegiance to his new faith. In this section, he draws on a variety of sources by the authoritative first-century scholars P. Nigidius Figulus and M. Terentius Varro, whose works are now largely lost.

Possumus, si uidetur, summatim aliquid et de Laribus dicere, quos arbitratur uulgus uicorum atque itinerum deos esse ex eo quod Graecia uicos cognominat [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]. In diuersis Nigidius scriptis, modo tectorum domumque custodes, modo Curetas illos, qui occultasse perhibentur Iouis aeribus aliquando uagitum, modo Digitos Samothracos, quos quinque indicant Graeci Idaeos Dactylos nuncupari. Varro, similiter haesitans, nunc esse illos Manes et ideo Maniam matrem esse cognominatam Larum, nunc aerios rursus deos et heroas pronuntiat appellari, nunc antiquorum sententias sequens Laruas esse dicit Lares, quasi quosdam genios, et functorum animas mortuorum.

If it seems appropriate, we can also say something in brief about lares, whom the common people consider the gods of the streets and paths because in Greek the streets are called lauras. In various writings Nigidius (Figulus) calls them now the guardians of house and home, then those Curetes who once managed to conceal Jove's wailing with the clashing of their weapons, then the five Digiti from Samothrace, whom the Greeks tell us are named Idaei Dactyli. Varro is similarly hesitant, now saying they should be called manes (spirits of the kindly dead), which is why Mania is called mother of lares, then again gods of the air and heroes, now declaring the lares to be spirits of the restless dead (larvae), following the opinion of ancient writers, as if they were sorts of personal protective spirits (genii) and the souls of those who have died.

(Arnobius Adversus Gentiles 3.41)

Interestingly, Arnobius starts by admitting that he knows perfectly well what the practitioners of the lares cult at the neighborhood altars themselves think, which is that the lares are gods of the streets or neighborhoods (vici) and roads (itinera). Not content with the opinion of the uneducated (uulgus), despite its being supported by a fanciful etymology from the Greek, he proceeds to collect a learned list of diverse explanations as to the nature of these gods, making a show of his own erudition and extensive research on this subject. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to judge how far Arnobius may himself be distorting what these earlier writers said.

P. Nigidius Figulus (ca. 98–45 BC), the slightly less eminent of his two chosen authorities, also recorded a version of lares as guardians of place, but in other passages seeks to equate the lares either with figures of Greek myth who helped Jupiter as an infant on Crete (Curetes) or with the Great Gods of Samothrace (Cabiri). Yet he does not seem to have chosen between these options or put them into a clear relation with each other, at least according to Arnobius. However, ancient authors often cited from memory rather than having an array of texts open in front of them. Arnobius is just providing us with glimpses of what his sources said.

Arnobius then moves on to cite M. Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), the most learned scholar of Roman religion and culture in the mid-first century BC. Here, however, he draws attention to Varro's hesitation, which is not typical of the famous polymath but is described as being shared with Figulus in the case of the lares. Varro was well aware of his prominent status as a leading intellectual of his day. He wrote widely and prescriptively on many aspects of Roman history, religion, culture, and custom. In addition, he circulated his criticisms of contemporary politics, fashion, and habits in satirical form in a variety of genres. Varro was a public intellectual who boldly expressed his opinions both on historical matters and on contemporary issues. It was simply not his habit or his intention to express doubt in his writings. Rather, it was part of his scholarly method to demonstrate his virtuosity in collecting the available material to produce an authoritative synthesis, which was usually followed by his own decisive contribution to the debate in question. Varro's hesitation should, therefore, make us realize that the explanations he records were highly debated and debatable even when he was writing. In this case, he was apparently unable to reach a conclusion that he himself found satisfactory, at least according to Arnobius.

Varro offers the following three options for explaining the lares: they are manes (spirits of the deceased) and that is why their mother is Mania; they are not gods of the underworld at all but of the sky who should be called "heroes" in Greek; their name lares should mean ghosts (laruae), which makes them souls of the dead (as if some kind of genius). Varro's indecision is logically caused by the fact that his three explanations are mutually exclusive, as he himself clearly realized. With very few exceptions, such as Persephone who regularly traveled between the underworld and the world of men, ancient gods belonged to particular spheres. Underworld gods were not and could not be the "same" as the gods of the sky or of the world of men.

Moreover, Arnobius' paraphrase implies that Varro made a deliberate contrast between his first two alternatives, the manes and the "heroes." Similarly, although not as explicitly articulated here, dii manes (ordinary spirits of the deceased) were classified as being very different from laruae (ghosts who were restless and often characterized as malicious). The spirits of the dead (manes) were normally associated with their tombs outside the city, where Romans made annual offerings to family members. By contrast, ghosts (larvae), described as the spirits of those not properly buried or of individuals who had died violently, wandered around and might even invade and take up residence in a house. Such a house would then be regarded as "haunted," an undesirable condition that needed to be rectified through rituals of exorcism and purification. Under normal circumstances, Roman houses were not imagined as being inhabited by malicious spirits or ghosts. In fact, every head of household took annual precautions, through a series of ceremonies and prayers on the festival of the Lemuria in May, to expel and repel any ghosts or evil spirits from his house.

To sum up briefly: Arnobius cites two learned Romans of Cicero's day, Varro and Figulus, each of whom mentioned three separate but mutually exclusive explanations for the character and name of the lares, giving the reader a total of six distinct options. At the same time, Arnobius indicates that Nigidius Figulus and Varro did not themselves engage in another of their typical scholarly habits, that of equating different cult titles or attributes of a deity to produce a kaleidoscopic but syncretistic and unified picture. Rather, each author expressed equivalent reservations (similiter haesitans) precisely because the explanations were, in fact, completely at variance with each other within the logic of Roman religious thought.

Varro knew that in the Roman concept of the cosmos a god could not belong both to the world above and to the underworld, just as most deities were not thought of as being both malicious and protective at the same time. Possibly for this very reason, Nigidius completely avoided mentioning associations of lares with the world of the dead (although he surely knew of these common ideas) in favor of a different contrast between either Greek myth or Roman local traditions. None of these three authors (Nigidius, Varro, or Arnobius himself) preferred the explanation of the lares as gods of place, despite the fact that this was the version associated with the cult practiced at the neighborhood shrines (compita) throughout Rome or with the lar familiaris at the hearth. The subsequent discussion about lares as spirits of the deceased seems to go back to Varro's treatment, as so much else does. The very inability or unwillingness of Nigidius and Varro to define the lares precisely should make us wary of how we make use of these and other learned and antiquarian explanations. Rather, they demonstrate that lares were not easy to integrate into the world of myth or into a systematic picture of Hellenized religion.

I will now go on to present arguments against identifying lares with the dead or the underworld. In order to clear the ground, my discussion will deal with the main examples and arguments used to paint a picture of spooky lares. Our basic context for understanding lares must come from their ubiquitous presence in temple, local shrine, and domestic cult. Lares received simple offerings of ordinary food and flowers from humble people on an almost daily basis. Their iconography showed them as young, merry, dancing figures, in informal dress and without individuality, but regularly associated with the wine they pour in the paintings from Campania. Their annual midwinter festival of Compitalia (see section III. xvii) was a popular occasion of merrymaking, drinking, and the performance of comedies and other entertainments, all of which culminated in a banquet of roast pork supplied from the pigs sacrificed to them. Their iconography or ritual does not, therefore, evoke the underworld or the appeasement of dangerous spirits. Far from being ritually banished from the home along with the spirits of the restless dead, lares were the Roman house's most familiar and characteristic deities. Unlike underworld deities, whose offerings were burned as holocausts, lares shared the sacrificed pig in a common meal with everyone in the neighborhood. Without antiquarian glosses and scholarly disputes based on dubious etymologies, no modern scholar of Roman religion would have connected lares with the dead or with the underworld based on the rituals or sites or occasions of their cult or on the iconography of the many paintings and statuettes that depict them.

Yet many discussions have adduced the words of Varro and Nigidius, in combination with antiquarian notices in Festus (drawing on the encyclopedist Verrius Flaccus), Macrobius, and Servius, as well as philosophical passages in Apuleius, to argue that lares were indeed worshipped as deified ancestors, both in the home and at the crossroads. This interpretation is, however, methodologically completely at variance with the significant advances in approach made in the study of Roman religion over the last generation. At the same time, it leads to a curious picture of lares shrines throughout the Roman city as if these were all set up either to commemorate or to appease the dead on every street corner and even more implausibly in every kitchen.

In addition to sharing their sacrificial pig with the whole neighborhood at the Compitalia, lar(es) also had a part to play at the regular evening meal of Romans. Lar(es) received a libation between the two courses that were usual at an evening meal. This practice, which is well attested in the first centuries BC and AD, also indicates that lares were household gods of the living family, who were associated with food preparation and consumption in a domestic setting. Underworld deities and ghosts were not invited to share a banquet with the living, let alone the family's supper every evening in the home.

We have good evidence for how elite Romans commemorated their deceased relatives who had held high office. These men were represented by wax masks (imagines) kept in cupboards in the atrium and labeled with inscriptions (tituli) that recorded their names and the highlights of their careers. Unlike the lares, who did not have personal names and individual identities, these distinguished "ancestors" were remembered specifically as named individuals, whose deeds were rehearsed with care and elaboration in eulogies at family funerals and in inscriptions at their tombs. Also in contrast to the lares, no cult is attested for them within the home (or indeed at the street corner). Streets and neighborhoods in Rome were not named for individuals, living or deceased. Rather families honored their dead, whether famous or obscure, annually with the adornment of their tombs outside the city where offerings were made.

The iconography of lares, with their long hair and short tunics, as they danced and poured wine for a feast, suggests nothing of the military and civic achievements associated with the famous Romans celebrated and recalled by the leading political families (nobiles) of republican Rome. No lar is ever depicted in a toga or in military dress with weapons. In other words, lares do not look or behave like Roman "ancestors." Nor is it either attested or credible that wealthy Romans, whether of the political class or not, entrusted the cultivation of their own ancestors to slaves in the kitchen or freedmen at the crossroads. Rome was a society that set great store by traditional gentilicial cults being maintained by blood relatives in each successive generation. Meanwhile, lares played no role of substance at a Roman funeral. Rather they were honored precisely at the Caristia, the February festival that celebrated the community of living family members after the completion of their annual visits to the graves to honor the dead. Lares are, therefore, specifically designated as members and protectors of the living household.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface ix

I Lar(es) / Genius and Juno / Snake(s) 1

i Varro Hesitates . . . 6

ii Origins and Early Evidence 18

iii A Lar Introduces Himself 31

iv Single Lar, Twin Lares 36

v Monthly Rituals at the Hearth 40

vi Kitchen Gods 46

vii A Genius Pours a Libation 53

viii Serpent(s) in a Garden 63

ix A Painted Landscape of Local Gods 71

II Shrines for Lares in Rome 76

x The Three Asses of the Bride 78

xi Temple: Aedes 86

xii Sanctuary: Ara / Fanum / Sacellum / Pomerium 104

xiii Crossroads Shrine: Compitum 116

xiv Lots of Small Shrines: Compita and Sacella 137

xv Pompeii: A Case Study 145

xvi Sacred Spaces and Lares Who Live in Them 157

III Celebrating Lares 160

xvii Compitalia: Who Is My Neighbor? 162

xviii Delos: A Case Study 175

xix Local Networks: Vicatim 192

xx Officers and Associations: (Vico)magistri, Ministri, Collegia 206

xxi Magistri and Ministri in Italy 226

xxii Politics at Compitalia 234

xxiii Religion and Politics at the Crossroads 250

IV Augustus and Lares Augusti 255

xxiv Augustus and Rome before 7 BC 258

xxv The Reform of 7 BC 271

xxvi Lares Augusti 284

xxvii Genius Augusti? 299

xxviii Who Gets the Bull? 311

xxix Ara Pacis Augustae: Who Gets the Pig? 320

xxx August Gods in the Vici 329

xxxi The “New Age” of Augustus: Time and History 336

xxxii Augustus and Lares Augusti 346

Epilogue 348

Appendix 1 References to Lares by Roman Authors: A List 353

Appendix 2 Lares in the Calendar at Rome 357

Appendix 3 Augustan Time Patterns 359

Bibliography 361

Index 387

Image Credits 391

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Harriet Flower's book is important for understanding the history of ancient Roman religion and the late republic. Above all, it is original and convincing in stressing the ubiquitous and pervading character of the cult of the lares in Rome and a number of other places in the Roman world."—Jörg Rüpke, University of Erfurt, Germany

"This important book provides a comprehensive treatment of the lares, the ancient Roman household gods, in all the contexts in which they are well-documented, revealing them to be much more significant than conventionally understood. Harriet Flower has yet again identified a neglected aspect of Roman life and produced a definitive treatment that illuminates an extraordinary range of further areas."—Catherine Steel, University of Glasgow

Editorial Reviews

Winner of a 2018 Charles Goodwin Award of Merit, Society for Classical Studies

From the Publisher