The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden by Harriet I. Flower

She examines the rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted alongside lares in paintings of gardens. She makes the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have argued, but rather benevolent protectors-gods of place, especially the household and the neighborhood, and of travel. Weaving together a wide range of evidence, Flower sets forth a new interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated book, the first to focus on the lares, Harriet Flower offers a strikingly original account of these gods and a new way of understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion.

These shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by slaves and freedmen, for whom the lares cult provided a unique public leadership role. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods.

Tammy K.The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites.

Gender Differences in Employment Status of College Students and Recent Graduates.

in computer science from Indiana University. Professor Meeden is a graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa, where she majored in mathematics. Her research is focused on machine learning techniques and developmental robotics. Meeden is a professor of computer science and an expert in adaptive robotics and artificial intelligence. Grabois ’57 Professorship in Natural Sciences and Engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. in ancient history from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Flower is a graduate of University College, Oxford. She is the author of several books including the recently published The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner(Princeton University Press, 2017). Flower taught at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Since 2010, she has been head of Mathey College, one of six residential communities for undergraduates on the Princeton campus.īefore joining the faculty at Princeton, Dr. Professor Flower joined the faculty at Princeton in 2003. Harriet Flower was named to the Andrew Fleming West Chair in Classics at Princeton University in New Jersey.

The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden by Harriet I. Flower