LARES - Domestic Lares

Domestic Lares

Traditional Roman households owned at least one protective Lares-figure, housed in a shrine along with the images of the household's penates, genius image and any other favoured deities. Their statues were placed at table during family meals and banquets. They were divine witnesses at important family occasions, such as marriages, births and adoptions, and their shrines provided a religious hub for social and family life. Individuals who failed to attend to the needs of their Lares and their families should expect neither reward nor good fortune for themselves. In Plautus' comedy Aulularia, the Lar of the miserly paterfamilias Euclio reveals a pot of gold long-hidden beneath his household hearth, denied to Euclio's father because of his stinginess towards his Lar. Euclio's own stinginess deprives him of the gold until he sees the error of his ways; then he uses it to give his virtuous daughter the dowry she deserves, and all is well.

Responsibility for household cult and the behaviour of family members ultimately fell to the family head, the paterfamilias but he could, and indeed should on certain occasions properly delegate the cult and care of his Lares to other family members, especially his servants. The positioning of the Lares at the House of Menander suggest that the paterfamilias delegated this religious task to his villicus (bailif).

Care and cult to domestic Lares could include offerings of spelt wheat and grain-garlands, honey cakes and honeycombs, grapes and first fruits, wine and incense. They could be served at any time and not always by intention: as well as the formal offerings that seem to have been their due, any food that fell to the floor during house banquets was theirs. On important occasions, wealthier households may have offered their own Lares a pig. A single source describes Romulus' provision of an altar and sacrifice to Lares Grundules ("grunting lares") after an unusually large farrowing of thirty piglets. The circumstances of this offering are otherwise unknown: Taylor conjectures the sacrifice of a pig, possibly a pregnant sow.