Varro, who discusses lares in his Antiquitates, has nothing to say about them in De re rustica, and Columella mentions a lar only in the context of the duties of a rural vilicus ( Rust.
Cato makes it clear that cultivation of the lar is essential to the household: when the master is away, the administration of the cult in an aristocratic property will fall to the vilicus’ wife, who should make offerings to the household lar on the kalends, nones, and ides of each month ( Agr. The latter depicts the cult of the lar as a central act of the paterfamilias. This shift of the lar to the fringes of the household can be dated to the later second century B.C.E. She suggests that the shift in the location of the cult and what became the close association of lar cults with slaves and freedmen is connected with the growth of domestic slavery, the Roman habit of freeing slaves, absentee farming by rich landowners, and the development of kitchens as separate rooms, which moved the seat of the lares from the center of family life to the slave quarters. In the opening series of essays, Flower shows that there were different ways of conceptualizing the lares, whose shrines often are found in the backs of houses, despite evidence suggesting that they were originally connected with the hearth and therefore the center of family life. Flower offers 32 such studies around four themes: the cult practices, the location of cult sites in Rome, the celebration of lares, and the Augustan creation of the cult of the Lares Augusti. She seeks to establish meaning through careful analysis of ritual gesture and action as described in literary texts, complemented “by study of religious iconography, especially in cases where visual language is well attested and integrated into cult sites” to avoid “multiple explanations and convoluted combinations produced by syncretism, whether ancient or modern” (3).Ī book whose overriding principle is to avoid making broad generalizations will naturally break into a series of discrete studies. Rejecting contemporary approaches that seek to establish a single identity for a god, Flower avoids “combining evidence from different times and places to create an artificial and anachronistic single cult for the lares either in the home or at the crossroads” (74). It is also an important book about the study of the traditional religions of the ancient Mediterranean.
It is rational, clear, well written, with no obvious flaw in production or fact.
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