Walk through Pompeii and you will pass dozens of them: a niche or a painted aedicula in a kitchen wall or a courtyard corner, showing two slim youths in short tunics, up on their toes as though dancing, each holding a drinking horn tipped over a bucket, with a large snake gliding along the plaster below. These are the Lares, and their shrines are the single best archaeological evidence anywhere for what Roman religion looked like to an ordinary household on an ordinary day.
Nobody could agree what they were
The argument about the Lares is not a modern invention; Roman writers were already unsure. One tradition makes them the spirits of the family's dead, which fits their association with the hearth and with the founding ancestors of a house. Another makes them powers of place — of the land a farm occupies, of the crossroads a neighbourhood shares — with no connection to any particular family's ancestry.
The evidence supports both and settles neither. Farm and crossroads cult points to place; the domestic prominence and the language of continuity points to ancestors. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship swung firmly to the agricultural reading and has since swung back towards uncertainty, which is the honest position. It is worth noticing that Rome had a separate and well-defined set of terms for the family dead — the Manes, addressed on gravestones — which weakens the simple equation.
Ovid supplies an origin story that is unmistakably Roman rather than borrowed: the talkative nymph Lara warned Juno of one of Jupiter's affairs, had her tongue cut out for it, and was sent to the underworld under escort by Mercury, who fathered the Lares on her along the way. Silenced, she became the goddess Muta, the mute one, also called Tacita.
What a household actually did
Offerings were made on the Kalends, Nones and Ides of each month, and at every significant event — a birth, a marriage, a son's coming of age, a journey begun or completed. Garlands were hung on the shrine. At meals a small portion was thrown into the hearth fire for them.
Crucially, the day-to-day tending of the shrine was substantially the work of slaves and freedmen. Cato's farm manual instructs the overseer's wife to garland the hearth on holidays and to make the offering; the cult in a large house was maintained by the staff, and freedmen frequently appear as the dedicants of shrine equipment. A religion of the household in Rome was a religion of everyone who lived in the household, not only of the family that owned it.
The crossroads, and a political scandal
Outside the door, the Lares belonged to the neighbourhood. Where several properties met, a small compital shrine stood open on four sides, and at the Compitalia in early January the local community — organised as a collegium — held sacrifices, games and a feast. Woollen dolls and woollen balls were hung at the shrine, and our source says one figure for each free member of the household and one ball for each slave: a census in wool.
These neighbourhood associations were also the natural organising units for street politics, which is exactly how the late Republic used them. The collegia compitalicia were banned in 64 BCE as a public-order threat and restored in 58 BCE by the tribune Clodius, who ran them as an instrument of mass mobilisation in Rome's streets. A festival of crossroads spirits sits at the centre of one of the Republic's most violent decades.
Augustus puts himself in every neighbourhood
In 7 BCE Augustus reorganised the city into fourteen regions and 265 vici, wards, each with its compital shrine, and had the cult reconstituted as the Lares Augusti — with his own genius worshipped alongside them. The officials, the vicomagistri, were mostly freedmen, and their names and terms of office survive on inscribed altars found across the city.
This was administrative reform, urban policing and religious innovation in one act, and it did something no temple could: it placed the emperor inside the daily devotions of the poorest streets in Rome, at every junction, permanently. Several of the surviving altars show the reformed scheme in relief, with the two dancing Lares flanking a togate figure making an offering.
Lares beyond the house
The category was elastic, and Rome extended it wherever a protective presence was wanted.
- Lares praestites, guardians of the city, shown with a dog or in a dog's skin — the watchful animal made divine.
- Lares permarini, of the sea, who received a temple after a naval victory in the early second century BCE.
- Lares viales, of the roads, invoked by travellers.
- Lares of the army camp, of granaries, and of individual provinces and towns, attested in inscriptions across the empire.
Etruscan names, and the domestic shrine after Rome
The element lar appears in Etruscan personal names — Lars Porsena is the best known — which has led to arguments for an Etruscan origin for the word, still unresolved. What is certain is that the practice proved unusually durable: the household shrine with a lamp, an image and a small offering has continued in Italian domestic life through and past the end of the ancient religion, and the Pompeian lararium is its direct ancestor in form if not in doctrine.
For modern purposes the Lares' main legacy is evidential. Because these shrines were in kitchens and corridors rather than in temples, they were preserved by the eruption of 79 CE in enormous numbers, and they are the reason we can describe Roman domestic religion with a confidence we have for almost no other ancient household practice.
Questions the lararium raises
Why is there a snake in the painting?
The serpent, usually shown moving towards an altar with an egg or a pine cone on it, is a protective spirit of the place — the agathodaimon of Greek usage — and sometimes appears as a pair, one crested and one not, generally read as male and female. Live snakes were tolerated around Roman houses as vermin control, which may be part of the image's origin. Roman sources are unhelpfully silent on it.
How do the Lares relate to the Penates?
They are frequently paired but are not the same. The Penates are the powers of the store cupboard and of the family's provision, and they travel with a family that moves; the Lares are attached to the house and its ground, and to the crossroads outside it. Ancient writers themselves blurred them, but the distinction shows in the cult: nobody speaks of Penates of the roads or of a province.
Did the emperor's cult replace the old crossroads worship?
It absorbed it. The Compitalia continued, the shrines stayed where they were, and the local officers were still local men — but the imperial genius was added to the honours and the offices became a recognised step in freedman society, with the right to wear the toga praetexta and be attended by lictors on festival days. It was a career ladder as much as a devotion.
Is there a surviving Lares shrine outside Pompeii and Herculaneum?
Yes, though rarely with paint intact. Compital altars have been excavated in Rome, Ostia preserves domestic shrines in apartment buildings, and lararium niches survive at sites across Italy, North Africa and the provinces. The Vesuvian cities are exceptional not for having them but for having them undamaged, with their painted plaster and their bronze statuettes still in place.