Private worship in the home is perhaps the oldest form of ritual worship practiced by people who had settled into towns and villages. Before there were temples, churches, and citied devoted to religion, there were private altars and personal offerings to the deities. The use of private home altars continues today and there is not much of a change between the altars of the past and the altars used by people today. Individuals of all faiths may set up an altar or sacred space in their home where they place icons, images, candles, or offerings.
I will examine two lararia, a household shrine, uncovered during excavations at Pompeii. One from a shop[1] and the other from the Casa dei Vetti, a large two-story house. My goal is to examine any links between how the household gods were worshipped and the status or occupation of the people who worshipped them in order to answer the question of whether the status of the person changes the location of the lararium was and what images adorned it.
The Roman city of Pompeii, founded in 80 BCE and destroyed in 79 CE, offers archaeologists and researchers a rare snapshot of ancient Roman life. Buried and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius Pompeii, and other areas such as Herculaneum and several villas retains images and artifacts of ancient Roman civilization that are not found in such entirety anywhere else in the Roman world. In Imperial, Rome religion could be practiced in several different spheres. There was the public sphere of state-sponsored festivals and temples in which sacrifices were made to the gods of the Roman pantheon. The other was the cultic or group sphere in which one or a pair of gods was worshipped at specific times during the year[2] in rituals that were not open to public viewing. The cults of Rome were deeply personal spiritual paths, and a person had to be initiated into the cult to attend and participate in the rituals. Lastly there was the private worship of gods in the home, in rites, “performed on behalf of individual persons, households, and clans” and not associated with public worship[3].
Function and Decoration of a Lararium
The most sacred, the most hallowed place on earth is the home of each
and every citizen. There are his sacred hearth and his household gods,
there the very centre of his worship, religion, and domestic ritual[4].
According to John Bodel, much of Roman domestic or household religion was centered around the worship performed by the individual. The lararium of a house was usually a wall-niche. This wall-niche was decorated with painted representations of the household gods, which flanked a figure of the genius[5] in the act of offering sacrifice[6]. In these wall-niches, statuettes of personal deities would sometimes be placed, and each would have had a personal meaning to the occupants of the household. In Pompeii many such statuettes were found with the remains of those attempting to flee the city, while some remained in place in the lararium[7].
One group of household gods were the Lares, the gods of household supplies. The Lares were primarily worshipped by the slaves and the servants of the household[8] and could be found in various places within the house. In the towns surrounding the Bay of Naples they were most often found in kitchens, but also in atria, peristyles, and gardens[9]. Bodel argues that painting or setting up a pair of Lares may have meant nothing more than that the individual believed in the sanctity of house and home. His reasoning is that “since ‘household’ shrines are found in many work establishments as well as in houses at both Pompeii and Ostia[10],” the Lares did not have a deeply religious meaning. For Bodel, the Lares were a way to show clients and visitors that the owner of the establishment had a sense of family and home.
Another set of gods were the Penates. These were the personal gods inherited by the family; they could be expressed through tokens and images collected by individuals. These gods were believed to bring wealth and provisions into the house[11]. The Penates were “fluid and open[12],” and could be changed and evolve with the household. In this way, they were unlike the more static Lares or even the genius, which could be considered a revered ancestral figure.
In the lararia of Pompeii, serpents are perhaps the most readily identified image. In some Pompeian lararia, the image of the snake is the only one depicted[13]. Images of snakes are not limited to the lararium. In Pompeii, they are found on public shrines, street crossings, and the crossroads. The pictures on the roads are identical in every respect to those found on the household shrines. The image of the serpent can be found alone or in a pair. The snakes painted on the shrines were often depicted as receiving offerings. It can be concluded from the work of archaeologists and researchers that several of the symbols and images depicted on the lararium were standard images of protection such as the Lares, serpents, and genii, masculine spirits. This allows us to narrow our study of lararia to the pictures that are not found to be shared or common among them.
In the more elegant homes of Pompeii, two lararia are often found. One would be incorporated into the architecture as a wall-niche. This lararium would be set up in a public room, such as the atrium or peristyle garden. The lararium would be richly decorated and painted. Sometimes they were flanked by columns or painted garlands. Another lararium would be in the services quarters. This lararium would be humbler, painted on the wall, and would not contain an image of the Penates, only the Lares. Even in smaller Pompeian houses without separate servant’s quarters, many times, there is found a second lararium or independent household shrine. Scholars understand this separation of shrines to be an indicator of the separate yet parallel religious practices of the family of the house and their slaves and servants[14].
(Meet Mago Contributor) Rev. Francesca Tronetti, Ph.D.
[1] George C. Boyce, “Significance of Serpents on Pompeian House Shrines.” American Journal of Archaeology 46:1 (January-March 1942): 16 http://www.jstor.org/stable/499103 (accessed February 28, 2011)
[2] Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2010), 11
[3] John Bodel, Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008) 249
[4] Cicero, De Domo Sua 41, 109
[5] The Genius was the essential spirit of the head of the household, the paterfamilias, which “guaranteed continuity of generation” J.-P. Descoeudres, Pompeii Revisited: The Life and Death of a Roman Town (Sydney: Meditarch, 1994)
[6] Bodel 2008: 256
[7] Mary Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 297
[8] Elaine Fantham, ed., Women in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 228
[9] Bodel 2008: 255
[10] Ibid. 262
[11] Ibid. 249
[12] Ibid. 264
[13] George C. Boyce, “Corpus of the Lararia of Pompeii.” Memoirs and the American Academy in Rome 14 (1937): 13 http://jstor.org/stable/4238593 (accessed February 28, 2011)
[14] Bodel 2008: 265
RE: Shrines… I found this essay to be informative although it has always made sense to me that the sacred finds a place in the home. When did we begin to place the divine OUTSIDE of the home ( and us)? My homes always had sacred places long before I understood what it was i was doing! Here in New Mexico I have four nichos one built into the wall in each of the four directions… and for some reason I find this arrangement more satisfying than having one place..