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Lares: an Outline of Roman Domestic Religion John Bodel

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Lares: an Outline of Roman Domestic Religion John Bodel 9781405175791_4_014.qxd 28/02/2008 11:18 Page 248 14 Cicero’s Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion John Bodel “Family” and “household” are concepts well known to historians of ancient Rome, whose sources make clear that a Roman familia comprised not only a person’s kin (or close kin, particularly in the standard nuclear configuration of mother, father, and children) but also, if the person owned property, any slaves or dependents living in the home and any slaves housed elsewhere. Originally and fundamentally, however, a familia was a household in that it comprised all those who resided within a single house, the domus.1 Law and custom gave special consideration to slaves living under the same roof as the paterfamilias, who was supposed to nurture them, according to the edifying myth, “as if they were his children” (in loco filiorum), and whose life they in turn were bound to protect with their own.2 One Roman conception of the family, in other words, featured a composite household encompassing slaves and freedmen as well as freeborn kin within a complex unit characterized by sharp differentiations in status but (in principle, at least) mutual affective ties and common collective interest. Another construed familia more broadly but exclusively as referring to the extended clan. A third conceived of it more narrowly as comprising only the servile property. Our sources use the term variously and at times ambiguously, and it is not always easy to tell, when family religion is concerned, precisely which familia is concerned.3 Those who lived within a house were not only members of a slave or free family or of a composite household. They were also individuals, and much of the religious behavior manifested in Roman homes – much, that is, of what counts as Roman domestic religion – was more personal and individual than communal and rep- resentative in any meaningful sense. In the Roman domus, personal piety found expression in familial and household worship through the two standard sets of household gods, the Lares (shared by all in the household but a particular focus of attention for the slave staff), and the Penates (personal, inherited – and thus 9781405175791_4_014.qxd 28/02/2008 11:18 Page 249 An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion 249 familial – images and tokens cultivated by individuals). Roman domestic religion thus had a dual nature, with two distinct but related sets of deities – one generic and collective (the Lares), the other pluralistic and individualized in orientation (the Penates) – canonically paired and set in juxtaposition with each other. Both types enjoyed a public as well as a private cult, but which influenced which and in what ways over time is unclear and has been much debated. A hundred years ago private religion was seen as a pristine, unfossilized form of popular religion, as yet untainted by institutionalization by the state but scarcely discernible during the historical period. That view predominated for more than half a century, but within the last few decades a new orthodoxy has emerged according to which private religion was so deeply embedded in the cultural identity of the Republican (male) citizen as to have been virtually absorbed by the state apparatus: acts of private worship, particu- larly those related to the household, provided little evidence of personal devotion but merely reflected engagement with the civic model of religion on which they were modeled.4 Neither view adequately accounts for the range of behaviors that traversed the porous boundary between Roman civic and familial cult, nor do the conventionally polar modern categories of public and private seem adequately nuanced to characterize the diversity of ways that personal devotion bridged the ter- ritory between the two in Roman life. One recent attempt to skirt the difficulty seeks refuge in ancient Roman definitions but finds those offered by contemporary witnesses to be problematic and incomplete.5 The second-century compiler Pompeius Festus, for example, categorizes as public “those rites (sacra) that are performed at public expense on behalf of the people and for the hills, rural districts, wards, and shrines” of Rome, whereas those “performed on behalf of individual persons, households (familiae), and clans ( gentes)” were private.6 In determining public and private according to a simple criterion (essentially, who paid), Festus offers a pragmatic and apparently unequivocal means of distinguishing between the two, but he offers no guidance as to how to classify the diverse religious practices sponsored by collective groups other than families, such as the private associations (collegia) that played such a prominent role in the social organization of Roman urban life, not only among persons united by extraneous connections but within the slave familiae of individual households, nor, in placing “household” between “individual” and “clan” in a spectrum of categories that ranges from a single member to an extended familial network, does he provide any indication where along the scale the nuclear unit that dominates modern conceptions of the family might fall. Varro’s observation that “individual families ought to worship the gods as the state does – communally” points to the common foundation of public and private religion in collective representation but leaves little room for an individual acting individually, not only in civic but in domestic cult.7 By familial worship Varro refers to the third of Festus’s categories of private rites, the gentilicial cults conducted publicly (in a spatial sense: they were financed privately) by representatives of the great families of the Republic on behalf of their individual clans ( gentes).8 As clan representation, transmitted only agnatically, died out over the centuries, so too 9781405175791_4_014.qxd 28/02/2008 11:18 Page 250 250 John Bodel did the gentilicial cults, except those few that were taken over by the state. By the end of the Republic few were actively maintained. Never an important deter- minant of Roman civic organization or political power, the gens waned even in cultural significance during the Empire and was replaced in ideology and practice by the family ( familia), in the broad sense of blood relations on both the mother’s and the father’s side.9 Accordingly, the obligation to perform hereditary gen- tilicial sacra, which remained closely tied in law, as it had always been in principle, to the transmission of property, gave way in practice to the voluntary adoption by individual familiae of distinctive customs of dress or adornment.10 Gentilicial cult as such thus has little relevance for an investigation of Roman household religion: for all its supposed cultural significance, the gens always remained more a conception, ill-defined and vague, than a practical social instrument, and the religious rites associated with it, which are occasionally attested during the Republic for particular clans, were even then always performed in public settings outside the house. As conspicuous demonstrations of familial piety, they served to promote the idea of the gens in public contexts; as manifestations of “family” religion, they are mere curiosities – relics, at best, during the historical period, more often mere status symbols. More useful than the gens for understanding the nature of Roman domestic cult, paradoxically, is the individual, the third element in Festus’s triage of Roman private religion. In discussing the religious conduct of individuals in the second book of his treatise On Laws, Cicero defines the boundary between proper and improper practice according to a distinction between gods held separately (separatim) and those held privately (privatim): “Let no one have gods separately, either new gods or foreign gods, unless publicly adopted. Privately let them worship those gods whom they have received as duly worshiped by their fathers (or ancestors: patres)” (De Legibus 2.19). In confirming the expected – that gods formally recognized by the state were legitimate objects also of private veneration, whereas certain others were not – Cicero does not explain what distinguishes “separate” from “private,” nor does he draw the line between the two quite where we might expect it: “separate” are those rites that are new or foreign, except those that receive public cult; “pri- vate” are those handed down by the “fathers.” It is unclear whether Cicero is think- ing of individual heads of households passing down to their children specific familial deities or of ancestors generally and the gods they collectively worshiped. Left out of his formulation in either case are those foreign cults not handed down by earlier generations but subsequently adopted publicly and therefore no longer separate. These eventually included not only all the traditional civic deities of the Roman pantheon but also various Asiatic and African newcomers (notably Ceres, the Great Mother, Isis, and Serapis), who, once officially recognized, received foreign rites within the formal structures of the state religion. Elsewhere, Cicero showed himself to be sensitive to the argument that Serapis and Isis might well be considered among the ancestral gods on the grounds that they had been accepted by their fathers but, in prescribing the forms of private worship permissible in his ideal state, no space is reserved for them (De Natura Deorum 3.47).11 9781405175791_4_014.qxd 28/02/2008 11:18 Page 251 An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion 251 In fact, the practices of Roman domestic and household religion were more varied and less clearly demarcated than Cicero or Festus would allow, and the preferences of individuals played a larger role in them than Varro was prepared to concede. The intermingling of deities from outside the traditional Roman pantheon with those sanctioned by the state that Cicero elsewhere brands as an undesirable “confusion of religions” (De Legibus 2.25) was in fact characteristic of Roman domestic worship, where personal choices made by individuals stood side by side with collective deities of the household.
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