d from the house and the land as an economic
and religious unit, and I am strongly inclined to see in Janus bifrons
of the Forum a developed form of the spirit of the house-door; but the
question is a difficult one, and I shall return to it in a lecture on
the deities of early Rome.

So far I have said nothing of the Lar familiaris who has become a
household word as a household deity; and yet we are on the point of
leaving the house of the old Latin settler to look for the spirits whom
he worships on his land. The reason is simply that after repeated
examination of the evidence available, I find myself forced to believe
that at the period of which I am speaking the Lar was not one of the
divine inhabitants of the house. When Fustel de Coulanges wrote his
brilliant book _La Cite antique_, which popularised the importance of
the worship of ancestors as a factor in Aryan civilisation, he found in
the Lar, who in historical times was a familiar figure in the house, the
reputed founder of the family; and until lately this view has been
undisputed. But if my account of the relation of the family to the gens
is correct, the family would stand in no need of a reputed founder; that
symbol of the bond of kinship was to be found in the gens of which the
family was an offshoot, a cutting, as it were, planted on the land.
Still more convincing is the fact that when we first meet with the Lar
as an object of worship he is not in the house but on the land. The
oldest Lar of whom we know anything was one of a characteristic Roman
group of which the individuals lived in the _compita_, _i.e._ the spots
where the land belonging to various households met, and where there were
chapels with as many faces as there were properties, each face
containing an altar to a Lar,--the presiding spirit of that allotment,
or rather perhaps of the whole of the land of the familia, including
that on which the house stood.[159] Thus the Lar fills a place in the
private worship which would otherwise be vacant, that of the holding and
its productive power. In this sense, too, we find the Lares in the hymn
of the Arval Brethren, one of the oldest fragments of Latin we possess;
for the spirits of the land would naturally be invoked in the lustration
of the _ager Romanus_ by this ancient religious gild.[160]

But how, it may be asked, did the Lar find his way into the house, to
become the characteristic deity of the later Roman private worship
there? I believe