Mother of the Lares

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The Mother of the

Muta (the speechless one) and Tacita (the silent one).[1]

Arval rite

Cult to Matres Larum is known through the fragmentary

puls (porridge) contained in a sacred, sun-dried earthenware pot (olla). Prayers are recited over the pot, which is then thrown from the temple doorway, down the slope on which the temple stands; thus, remarks Lily Ross Taylor,[2] towards the earth as a typically chthonic offering. On another occasion, the Arvals offer sacrificial recompense to various deities for a necessary pollution of Dia's sacred grove; the Mater Larum is given two sheep.[3] The Arvals also invoke her children, in the opening lines of the Arval Hymn to Dia, which begins enos Lases iuvate ("Help us, Lares").[4]

Festivals

The Mater Larum may have been offered cult with her Lares during the festival of

Lemuralia
, when the vagrant and malicious Lemures and (perhaps) Larvae must be placated by midnight libations of spring-water and offerings of black beans, spat from the mouth of the paterfamilias to the floor of the domus. Again, Taylor notes the chthonic character of offerings made to fall – or deliberately expelled – towards the earth.

Macrobius applies it to the woolen figurines (maniae) hung at crossroad shrines during Compitalia, thought to be substitutions for ancient human sacrifice once held at the same festival and suppressed by Rome's first consul, L. Junius Brutus.[6]

Myth

The only known mythography attached to Mater Larum is little, late and poetic: again, the source is Ovid, [7] who identifies her as a once-loquacious nymph, Lara, her tongue cut out for betrayal of Jupiter's secret amours. Lara thus becomes Muta (speechless) and is exiled from the daylight world to the underworld abode of the dead (ad Manes); a place of silence (Tacita). She is led there by Mercury and impregnated by him en route. Her offspring are as silent or speechless as she.[8]

Nature

If their mother's nature connects the Lares to the earth they are, according to Taylor, spirits of the departed and their mother a dark or terrible aspect of

daimones" as translations for Lares and Plautus employs a Lar Familiaris where Menander's Greek original has a heroon (hero-shrine).[11]

Notes

  1. ^ Taylor, 301: citing "Mania" in Varro, Lingua Latina, 9, 61; "Larunda" in Arnobius, 3, 41; "Lara" in Ovid, Fasti II, 571 ff: Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1, 7, 34-5; Festus, p115 L.
  2. ^ Taylor, Lilly Ross, "The Mother of the Lares", American Journal of Archaeology, 29.3, (July - September 1925), pp 299 - 313.
  3. ^ Beard et al, vol. 2, 151: section 6.2: CIL VI.2107, 2-13: ILS 5048. The grove was polluted by the use of iron tools when clearing up after a storm and lightning-strike. Iron was strictly forbidden in the sacred area.
  4. ^ Taylor, 299.
  5. ^ Macrobius, Saturnalia I, 7, 35.
  6. ^ Taylor, 302: whatever the truth regarding this sacrifice and its abolition, the Junii held ancestor cult during Larentalia rather than the usual Parentalia even in the 1st century BC.
  7. ^ Fasti, II.571ff
  8. ^ Link to Latin text of Ovid's Fasti II at the latinlibrary.com
  9. ^ Taylor, 300-301; Wiseman, 71, is more oblique and suggests that the Lemuria might represent Lara's "bitterness at the cruelty of her treatment".
  10. Lars Porsenna
    : "When Porsenna, Lars (lord) of Clusium, in Etruria, had reached with his army the Ja-nic'u-lum, just across the Tiber from Rome... (John Jacob Anderson, A complete course in history: new manual of general history 1893:pt I, 190 ).
  11. ^ Weinstock, 114-18, proposes the equivalence of "lar" and Greek hero, based on his gloss of a 4th century BC inscription from Latium as a dedication to the Roman ancestor-hero Aeneas as Lare (Lar).

References and further reading

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