Lares: Did you mean...?

To the ancient Romans, everything was imbued with a divine spirit (numen, plural: numina) which gave it life. Even supposedly inanimate objects like rocks and trees possessed a numen, a belief which no doubt grew out of the early religious...

Fresco depicting two Lares (protective deities, sons of the god Mercury) pouring wine from a drinking horn (rhyton) into a bucket (situla). They stand on either side of a scene of sacrifice. The head of the family makes offerings, a musician...

The Roman imperial cult was the practice of venerating Roman emperors and their families as having divine attributes, honoring their contributions to the spread of Roman religion and culture. It was instituted by the first Roman emperor Augustus...

The temple remains visible on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure were discovered during the 1930s CE urban renewal project. The two columns were re-erected in the 1950s CE on the temple podium. The column drums are travertine, faced with stucco...

Roman sculpture blended the idealised perfection of Classical Greek sculpture with a greater aspiration for realism. It also absorbed artistic preferences and styles from the East to create images in stone and bronze which rank among the...

Mercury (Mercurius) was the Roman god of commerce, often serving as a mediator between the gods and mortals, his winged feet giving him the advantage of speed, and so was the patron of circulation in general - of people, goods and messages...

Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, the home, and domestic life in the Roman religion (idenitified with the Greek goddess Hestia). She was the first-born of the titans Kronos and Rhea and, like the others, was swallowed by her father. When...

Kikimora (pronounced Kih-kee-mora) is a female house spirit from Slavic lore who can be helpful or malevolent depending on the behavior of the homeowner. In differing versions of her stories, there are two kinds of spirit, one generally helpful...

Rome began as a small city on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy. The Latin tribes (also known as the Latini or Latians) inhabited the region c. 1000 BCE but the founding of the city is dated to 753 BCE. The family was the center and foundation...

A Roman boy's rite of passage, a ceremony or ritual marking a transitional period in life from childhood to adulthood, was the assuming of the toga virilis, the adult toga. The ceremony usually took place sometime between the boy's 14th and...