o other deities are very prominent in the worship of the early
household, and each is a characteristic product of Roman religious
feeling, the Lar Familiaris and the Genius. The Lares[5] seem to have
been in origin the spirits of the family fields: they were worshipped,
as Cicero tells us, 'on the farm in sight of the house,' and they had
their annual festival in the Compitalia, celebrated at the
_compita_--places where two or more properties marched. But one of
these spirits, the _Lar Familiaris_, had special charge of the house
and household, and as such was worshipped with the other domestic gods
at the hearth. As his protection extended over all the household,
including the slaves, his cult is placed specially in the charge of the
bailiff's wife (_vilica_). He is regularly worshipped at the great
divisions of the month on Calends, Nones, and Ides, but he has also an
intimate and beautiful connection with the domestic history of the
family. An offering is made to the Lar on the occasion of a birth, a
wedding, a departure, or a return, and even--a characteristically Roman
addition--on the occasion of the first utterance of a word by a son of
the house: finally, a particularly solemn sacrifice is made to him
after a death in the family.

The Genius is perhaps the most difficult conception in the Roman
religion for the modern mind to grasp. It has been spoken of as the
'patron-saint' or 'guardian-angel,' both of them conceptions akin to
that of the Genius, but both far too definite and anthropomorphic: we
shall understand it best by keeping the '_numen_' notion clearly in
mind and looking to the root-meaning of the word (_genius_ connected
with the root of _gignere_, to beget). It was after all only a natural
development of the notions of 'animism' to imagine that man too, like
other objects, had his indwelling spirit--not his 'soul' either in our
sense of moral and intellectual powers, or in the ancient sense of the
vital principle--but rather as the derivation suggests, in origin
simply the spirit which gave him the power of generation. Hence in the
house, the sphere of the Genius is no longer the hearth but the
marriage-bed (_lectus genialis_). This notion growing somewhat wider,
the Genius comes to denote all the full powers, almost the personality,
of developed manhood, and especially those powers which make for
pleasure and happiness: this is the origin of such common phrases as
_genium curare_, _genio indulgere_,