LARES - Origins and Development

Origins and Development

Archaic Rome's Etruscan neighbours practiced domestic, ancestral or family cults very similar to those offered by later Romans to their Lares. Ancient Greek and Roman and authors offer "heroes" and "daimones" as translations of "Lares"; the early Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) employs a Lar Familiaris as a guardian of treasure on behalf of a family, as a plot equivalent to the Greek playwright Menander's use of a heroon (as an ancestral hero-shrine). Weinstock proposes a more ancient equivalence of Lar and Greek hero, based on his gloss of a 4th century BC Latin dedication to the Roman ancestor-hero Aeneas as Lare (Lar).

No physical Lar images survive from before the Late Republican era, but literary references suggest that cult could be offered to a single Lar, and sometimes many more: in the case of the obscure Lares Grundules, perhaps thirty. By the early Imperial era, they had become paired divinities, probably through the influences of Greek religion – in particular, the heroic twin Dioscuri – and the iconography of Rome's semi-divine founder-twins, Romulus and Remus. They are represented as two small, youthful, lively male figures clad in short, rustic, girdled tunics – made of dogskin, according to Plutarch. They take a dancer's attitude, tiptoed or lightly balanced on one leg. One arm raises a drinking horn (rhyton) aloft as if to offer a toast or libation; the other bears a shallow libation dish (patera). Compitalia shrines of the same period show Lares figures of the same type. Painted shrine-images of paired Lares show them in mirrored poses to the left and right of a central figure, understood to be an ancestral genius.