Homes

Archaeology of homes of even modest size in the Roman world has demonstrated the integral importance of domestic cult, which involves the various rites and ritual centers devoted to protective gods, ancestral gods, and immediate ancestors. The evidence includes wall niches and miniature shrines, divine images, and evidence of offerings (usually liquids, grains and foodstuffs, and incense, rather than animal parts). In Rome, the two main orders of domestic deities were the lares and the penates, which carried various protective functions. In addition, rituals were devoted to the genius, the sacred power behind the family and its current patriarch (Orr 1978). In Roman Egypt, domestic forms of great deities (Harpocrates, Isis) as well as deities specific to household protection (Bes) were represented in homes and received ritual devotion (Frankfurter 1998a: 131-42).

Household images functioned both as miniature representations of major temple gods and as appropriations of these gods and their powers for domestic functions: fecundity, militant protection from demonic beings, or the magnification of food. While animal offerings were rare in domestic cult, representations of animal offerings near the shrine niche (or stamped on festival food) offered vicarious participation in official temple sacrifices (Orr 1978: 1577-85). The niches and portable shrines that housed these images, often modeled on temples, reinforced the sense that the object of household devotion ‘‘contained’’ the power of the temple god. It is likely that domestic figurines (and accoutrements like lamps) were procured from merchants by the temple precincts. Domestic shrines also provided a domestic link with temple festivals and processions, for it is here that one would place holiday food offerings, newly blessed objects from festal shrine visits, and sometimes lamps lit for the goddess or god. Festival foods are particularly represented for domestic religion in Roman Egypt, for example, with evidence for ritual vessels, bread stamps, and honey offerings. Lamps likewise seem to have played an integral role in linking the fortune of the household and the power of a regional god during festival time (Dunand 1976). In this way there was a perpetual dialogue between domestic and central religious worlds (Frankfurter 1998a: 131-42).

This dialogue is most apparent in the miniaturizations discussed above and in the home’s centrifugal reception of the central cult’s power, but representation could go the other direction as well. In Rome, the sacred fire that the Vestal Virgins tended in the temple of Vesta represented a symbolic expansion - to the Roman cosmic sphere - of the domestic hearth and the various protective rites that women maintained there (their virginal status signifying the powerful ambiguity necessary to raise domestic cult to cosmic status: Beard, North, and Price 1998: 51-4).

Domestic cult also comprised the care for and invocation of the ancestral dead. In most cultures of the Roman Mediterranean these responsibilities were fulfilled at gravesites, necessarily located outside city boundaries, and involved offerings and feasts in communion with the deceased (more elaborate tombs had banquet rooms built inside). Often the feasts of the dead took place on common holidays, just as the deceased were often understood to join the ranks of a particular supernatural society - in Rome, the Di Manes - or to be assimilated to a particular god, such as Osiris in Egypt. Thus the domestic reverence for the dead, like the veneration of domestic gods, had a civic dimension (J. M. C. Toynbee 1971: 48-55, 61-4; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 270-1; Kakosy 1995: 2997-3023; Scheid 2003: 167-70).

The importance of memorializing the dead is reflected in epitaphs and grave decoration throughout the Roman world, as well as in the rich archaeology of grave offerings. Neglecting one’s ancestors might bring havoc down on the household (or, in Egypt, lurid suffering for the deceased in the liminal zones of the postmortem world); yet mortuary rites were performed less out of fear than a desire for contact with the deceased. One of the first crises among the Thessalonian Jesus-devotees, for example, was the believers’ fear (c.50 ce) that their recently deceased family members might not be able to join them in the heavenly world (1 Thes 4:1317). In Roman Egypt, the use of portraits of the deceased to individualize mummies has been taken as evidence of some kind of domestic display: either the portrait alone, before affixing it to the mummy, or the entire mummy for a period, in some room in the house, as ancient authors suggest (Montserrat 1997; Borg 1997). Maintaining contact with the dead was thus critical to domestic fortune.

Due to its largely private sphere of performance, domestic cult in general could persist apart from anti-‘‘pagan’’ repression. Indeed, as critical as it is to the maintenance of social life, domestic cult may well be the most resilient form of traditional religion. Christian writers describe domestic cult practices continuing well after central and regional shrines had been destroyed (CTh. 16.10.12 [392 ce]; Martin of Braga, De corr. rust. 16 [VI ce]; cf. Flint 1991: 226-8, 286-8; MacMullen 1997: 61-4, 109-12; Frankfurter 1998a: 27-30, 62-5, 131-2). Moreover, the relative independence of households to interpret domestic rites, especially in times of religious decentralization or repression, allows these same rites to assume new meaning under the hegemony of new religious systems like Christianity or Islam.