valuable and represents a historical reality.




CHAPTER V

WORSHIP OF THE HOUSEHOLD


=1. The Deities.=--The worship of the household seems to have
originated, as has been suggested, in the sense of the sacredness of
certain objects closely bound up with the family life--the door, the
protection against the external world, by which the household went out
to work in the morning and returned at evening, the hearth, the giver
of warmth and nourishment, and the store-cupboard, where was preserved
the food for future use. At first, in all probability, the worship was
actually of the objects themselves, but by the time that Rome can be
said to have existed at all, 'animism' had undoubtedly transformed it
into a veneration of the indwelling spirits, Ianus, Vesta, and the
Penates.

Of the domestic worship of Ianus no information has come down to us,
but we may well suppose that as the defence of the door and its main
use lay with the men of the household, so they, under the control of
the _pater familias_, were responsible for the cult of its spirit.
Vesta was, of course, worshipped at the hearth by the women, who most
often used it in the preparation of the domestic meals. In the original
round hut, such as the primitive Roman dwelt in--witness the models
which he buried with his dead and which recent excavations in the Forum