ly in Roman history.

The centre therefore of early religious life is the family, and the
state as a macrocosm of the family; and the father of each family is its
chief priest, and the king as the father of the state is the chief
priest of the state. As for the individual the only god which he has for
worship is his "double," called in the case of a man his _Genius_ and in
that of a woman her _Juno_, her individualisation of the goddess Juno,
quite a distinct deity, peculiar to herself. But even here the family
instinct shows itself, and though later the Genius and the Juno
represent all that is intellectual in the individual, they seem
originally to have symbolised the procreative power of the individual in
relation to the continuance of the family. The family and the state,
however, side by side worshipped a number of deities.

In the primitive hut, the model of which has come down to us in so many
little burial urns of early time (for example those that have recently
been dug up in the wonderful cemetery under the Roman Forum), with its
one door and no window, there were several elements which needed
propitiation; the door itself as the keeper away of evil, the hearth,
and the niche for the storage of food. The door-god was the god-door
Janus, the _ianua_ itself; the hearth was in the care of the womenfolk,
the wife and daughters, so it was a goddess, Vesta, whom they served;
and the storage-niche, the _penus_, was in the keeping of the
"store-closet gods" (_Di Penates_). The state itself was modelled after
the house. It had its Janus, its sacred door, down in the Forum, and the
king himself, the father of the state, was his special priest; it had
its hearth, where the sacred fire burned, and its own Vesta, tended by
the vestal virgins, the daughters of the state; and it had its
store-niche with its Penates. At a later date but still very early there
was added to the household worship the idea of the general protector of
the house, the Lar, which gave rise to the familiar expression "Lares
and Penates." The origin of this _Lar Familiaris_, as he is called, is
interesting, because it shows the intimate connection between the
farming life of the community and its religion. The Lares were
originally the group of gods who looked after the various farms; they
were in the plural because they were worshipped where the boundary lines
of several farms met, but though several of them were worshipped
together, each farm had it