Religion at Home and Honouring the Dead
Worship in the Roman Home
Roman religion was not only about grand public temples. Every household had its own sacred space and its own religious duties. The politician Cicero described the house of a Roman citizen as holy ground, asking “What is there more holy, what is there more worthy of respect, than the house of every individual citizen?” He reminded his audience that “here are his altars, here are his hearths, here are his household gods.” For Cicero, the family home was as sacred as any public temple.
Every Roman household kept a shrine called the lararium, home to the family’s Lares and the Penates. Offerings were left there each morning to keep the family safe.
The Lar Familiaris
Every family had its own guardian spirit, the Lar familiaris, worshipped as a small statue dressed in a short tunic and holding a dish for food or drink. The playwright Plautus imagined this spirit speaking for himself at the start of his comedy, Pot of Gold. The spirit introduces himself: “I am Lar Familiaris, the guardian spirit of this house”, explaining that he has “been in charge of this house now for a great many years”, watching over three generations of the same family.
In the play, the spirit judges each family member by how well they honour him. It was the grandfather who dutifully entrusted the buried money to the Lar; his son was “far less dutiful” and “far less respectful”, so the Lar in turn “did as little as possible for him”, and the present owner is of much the same character. Only the present owner’s daughter still brings daily gifts of incense, wine and flowers, so the spirit decides to reward her with a hidden fortune buried under the hearth. The story shows Romans believed the gods of the home responded directly to how faithfully they were worshipped.
Roman children wore protective charms to ward off evil spirits. Boys wore a bulla around their neck, alongside the toga praetexta — the purple-bordered toga that marked out free-born childhood. When a boy came of age he laid aside his bulla as a rite of passage into manhood, though he might still wear it on special occasions afterwards. Girls wore a crescent-shaped pendant called a lunula, which they dedicated to the goddess Venus on the eve of their wedding, along with the rest of their childhood toys.
Honouring the Dead
The earliest Roman laws, the Twelve Tables, set out strict rules for funerals. One rule stated that “a dead person shall not be buried or burned in the city”, keeping burial grounds outside the sacred boundary. Others limited how lavish a funeral could be: expenses were capped, women were forbidden from tearing their cheeks or crying out loudly, and no gold could be buried with a corpse — except any gold used in dental work.
Romans practised both cremation and burial. Wealthier families stored cremated ashes in a columbarium, where each niche might be marked with a plaque or bust and could hold several family members. Poorer Romans used simple storage jars buried in the ground. Archaeologists excavating a burial near Caerleon in Wales found a lead canister of ashes connected to the surface by a pipe, so the family could pour food and drink offerings down to the dead for years afterwards.
Tomb owners feared their graves would be robbed or damaged, so some inscribed curses on the stone. One tomb, belonging to a man named Caius Tullius Hesper, warns that if anyone disturbs or steals from it, “I wish for him to live a long time with bodily pains, and for the gods of the underworld not to receive him when he has died.” Curses like this show how seriously Romans took the protection of a family’s resting place.
Romans held three annual festivals connected to the dead: the Parentalia (13th–21st February), its final public day the Feralia, and the Lemuria (9th, 11th and 13th May).
Festivals of the Dead
The Parentalia began as a private festival remembering dead family members before growing into a wider public occasion. During its nine days, temples closed and no marriages could take place. The poet Ovid explained that the dead did not expect expensive gifts, writing that ghosts “value piety more than a costly gift” — a few grains of salt, bread soaked in wine or scattered violets left at the tomb were offering enough. The final day, the Feralia, was a public ceremony of gifts and remembrance at the graves.
The Lemuria had a different purpose: driving dangerous, restless spirits called lemures out of the house. Ovid describes the head of the household rising at midnight, walking barefoot, and throwing black beans over his shoulder nine times while repeating “With these beans I throw I redeem me and mine.” He then struck bronze together and called out “Ancestral spirit, depart” nine times before looking back, believing the rite complete. A surviving mosaic shows a skeleton holding jugs, possibly used by households to make noise and frighten the lemures away.
Beliefs About the Afterlife
Not all Romans agreed on what happened after death. In Cicero’s De Re Publica, the ghost of Scipio Africanus tells his descendant that men who serve the state well are rewarded with “a special place reserved for them in the heavens, where they may enjoy perpetual happiness”, and that true life only begins once the soul is “freed from the chains, from that prison house, the body”.
Virgil’s Aeneid gives a fuller picture of the underworld. Souls are punished for the faults built up during life — some “scourged by torments”, others cleansed by wind or fire — before the virtuous pass to the joyful fields of Elysium. After a thousand years, souls drink from the river Lethe, forgetting their past lives, and are sent back to be reborn in new bodies. This range of belief shows that Roman ideas about death were as varied as their private rituals for honouring it.