Summary

The main obstacle to understanding religion in the domestic realm is probably the prevailing, ubiquitous inconsistency. There is no clear-cut line between sacred and secular objects and decoration. Strictly speaking, only the main figures of the domestic religion - the Lares and the Genius - in their painted or three-dimensional form can be judged as unmistakably religious objects. All the other media consist of different layers of meaning which often cannot be neatly separated.

FURTHER READING

There is no comprehensive study of the subject so far, but several aspects are treated separately. As far as sculpture is concerned, Eugene J. Dwyer (1982) presents the contents of five Pompeian houses, whereas two recent publications about the terrace houses of Ephesus cover the whole range of interior decoration of two dwelling units (Lang-Auinger 2003; Thur 2005). Antonella Coralini (2001), on the other hand, takes one divinity, Hercules, as a starting point. Bettina Bergmann (1994) analyzes the paintings of the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii with respect to the art of memory. Three volumes of conference proceedings on Roman housing (Gazda 1991; Laurence and Wallace-Hadrill 1997; A. Frazer 1998) contain papers dealing with different aspects of the subject; see, amongst others, Elizabeth Bartman (1991) and Richard Neudecker (1998) on sculpture collections and Sarah Scott (1997) on late Roman mosaics.

PART III

Symbols and Practices