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Lares
Encyclopedia Britannica
LARES were Roman deities, whose character and worship share in the obscurity that envelops all antique Roman religion. They belonged to the cultus of the dead, from which so much of Roman and Greek religion was derived; they were the deified ancestors still living in their graves in the house, and worshipped by the family as their guardians and protectors. But the dead were powerful also to do harm, unless they were duly propitiated with all the proper rites; they were spirits of terror as well as of good; in this fearful sense the names Lemures and still more Larvae were appropriated to them. The name Lar has been thought to bean Etruscan word, meaning “lord”; it is a common personal name or title in Etruria. We find certainly, from a very early time, a distinction between Lares privati and Lares frublici. The former were worshipped in the house by the family alone, and the Lar familiaris was conceived as the head of the family and of the family cultus. The Lares publici belonged to the state religion; and their worship, after having fallen into neglect, was restored by Augustus and to some extent remodelled. It is therefore difficult to distinguish how far the known rites of the cultus are ancient; but it seems certain that the genius of Augustus, as refounder of the state, was added, and that the original Lares praestites were two in number. Schwegler and others have maintained that this pair are the twin brothers so frequent in early religions, the Romulus and Remus of the Roman foundation-legend; that the tale of the twinsis in most of its elements derived from the religion of the two Lares; that Acca Larentia, the fostermother of the twins, is the same as Lara, Larunda, Mania, or Muta, the mother of the Lares; and that the Larentalia, celebrated on December ...23, was a feast of the Lares. But the two sets of legends must be strictly distinguished: the difference in the quantity of the opening syllable shows that Larentia has no connexion with Larunda and the Lares; the Larentalia was a festival of Jupiter and Acca Larentia, in which the Lares had no place; and Mommsen argues that Remus was a late addition to the foundation legend, in which originally Romulus alone was known. As restored by Augustus, the Lares praestites were the guardians of the state and protectors of its unity; and, in lesser circles, every division of the city had likewise its Lares compitales, now three in number, who had their own aedicula at the cross roads and their special festival, Compitalia. The temple of the city Lares (sacellum Larum) was near the top of the Via Sacra.
The worship of the private Lares, who had their heme either on the hearth of the atrium or in their own little shrine, lararium, persisted throughout the pagan period, but in later time changed its character to a great extent. The emperor Alexander Severus had images of Abraham, Christ, and Alexander the Great among his household Lares. These domestic Lares were worshipped daily, but with special rites on the kalends, nones, and ides of every month; they shared with the family in every festival; when the young bride entered the house for the first time she offered a sacrifice to them; when the boy assumed the toga virilis he dedicated his childish bulla to the Lar familiaris. Marquardt maintains that there was only one Lar in each household, and that the two Lares compitales were the .guardians of the two roads that intersected at the compita. The Lemures as distinguished from the Lares were propitiated at the festival of the Lcmuralia, on the 9th, llth, and 13th of May. In it the dead were propitiated, and the strange unexplained ceremony of throwing the argei into the river was performed. A legend of the birth of the Lares makes them children of the god Mercury and a female figure, Larunda, Lara, or Lala. The fact that the dog was sacred to them, and that a stone figure of a dog stood in the Sacellum Larum, deserves notice in illustration of this legend, for the dog is connected with the Greek god Hermes. Probably this may have arisen under Greek influence. Other classes of Lares mentioned as early as the republican period are the Laves rurales, viales, permarini. · To the last-named Aurelius dedicated a temple in commemoration of the naval victory over Antiochus, 190 b.c. The generally accepted view is that the Lares are represented as young men, crowned with laurel, dressed in short high-girt tunics, holding horns and cups in their hands; but Marquardt, in accordance with his view that there was only one Lar, considers that these two figures are penates, and on a coin of the gens Caesia the Lares are represented aS two young men with chlamys and spear, seated, with a dog between them. Jordan remarks that in the cinctus Gabinus the end of the toga was thrown over the head, whereas the Lares always wear only a tunic, and have never veiled heads. The Compitalia was, during the Republican time, &feria conceptiva, set by the praetor at some time soon after the Saturnalia, December 17-19. Under the empire it was fixed for January 3-5.
See Schomann, De Diis Manibus; Hertzberg, De Diis Roman patr.; Hartung, Relig. der Römer; Schwegler, Röm. Gesch., vol. ii.; Preller, Röm. Mythol,.∖ Jordan, “Vesta und die Laren,” and “De Larum Imag.,” in Annali, 1862; Reifferscheid, “De Lar. pict. Pomp.,” in Annali, 1863; Marquardt, Röm. Staatsverw., iii. 120, 197, 244; Mommsen, “Acca Larentia,” in Röm. Forsch., ii., and “Remus Legend,” in Hermes, 1881.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 14, p. 313
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