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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Pre-Christian European & Mediterranean religions
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The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden - Religion at the Roman Street Corner (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,178
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The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden - Religion at the Roman Street Corner (Hardcover)
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The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional
mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by
elites. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners,
farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to
the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods. These
shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by
slaves and freedmen, to whom the lares cult provided a unique
public leadership role. In this comprehensive and richly
illustrated book, the first to focus on the lares, Harriet Flower
offers a strikingly original account of these gods and a new way of
understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion.
Weaving together a wide range of evidence, Flower sets forth a new
interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. She makes
the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have
argued, but rather benevolent protectors--gods of place, especially
the household and the neighborhood, and of travel. She examines the
rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their
iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted
alongside lares in paintings of gardens. She also looks at
Compitalia, a popular midwinter neighborhood festival in honor of
the lares, and describes how its politics played a key role in
Rome's increasing violence in the 60s and 50s BC, as well as in the
efforts of Augustus to reach out to ordinary people living in the
city's local neighborhoods. A reconsideration of seemingly humble
gods that were central to the religious world of the Romans, this
is also the first major account of the full range of lares worship
in the homes, neighborhoods, and temples of ancient Rome.
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