ns. After the
first and chief course of the mid-day meal, silence was enjoined, and an
offering of a part of the cake was thrown on to the fire from a small
sacrificial plate or dish (_patella_).[147] This alone is enough to
prove that Vesta, the spirit of the fire, was the central point of the
whole worship, the spiritual embodiment of the physical welfare of the
family.

Behind the hearth, _i.e._ farther at the back of the _atrium_, was the
_penus_, or storing-place of the household. _Penus_ was explained by the
learned Scaevola[148] as meaning anything that can be eaten or drunk,
but not so much that which is each day set out on the table, as that
which is kept in store for daily consumption; it is therefore in origin
the food itself, though in later times it became also the receptacle in
which that food was stored. This store was inhabited or guarded by
spirits, the _di penates_, who together with Vesta represent the
material vitality of the family; these spirits, always conceived and
expressed in the plural, form a group in a way which is characteristic
of the Latins, and their plurality is perhaps due to the variety and
frequent change of the material of the store. The religious character of
the store is also well shown by the fact, if such it be, that no impure
person was allowed to meddle with it; the duty was especially that of
the children of the family,[149] whose purity and religious capability
was symbolised throughout Roman history by the purple-striped toga which
they wore, and secured also by the amulet, within its capsule the
_bulla_, of which I spoke in the last lecture.

Vesta and the Penates represent the spiritual side of the material needs
of the household; but there was another divine inhabitant of the house,
the Genius of the paterfamilias, who was more immediately concerned with
the continuity of the family. Analogy with the world-wide belief in the
spiritual double of a man, his "other-soul," compels us to think of this
Genius, who accompanied the Latin from the cradle to the grave, as
originally a conception of this kind. The Latins had indeed, in common
with other races, what we may call the breath-idea of the soul, as we
see from the words _animus_ and _anima_, and also the shadow-idea, as is
proved by the word _umbra_ for a departed spirit. But the Genius was one
of those guardian spirits, treated by Professor Tylor as a different
species of the same genus, which accompany a man all his li