The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner

Harriet Flower's The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden is a scholarly study of household and neighborhood religion in ancient Rome, focusing on the Lares, guardian spirits of the household and crossroads, and on garden serpent cults, forms of everyday Roman religious practice that operated below the level of state cult. Flower is a recognized classicist and the book is published by Princeton University Press, giving it strong academic standing. Its particular contribution is bringing careful attention to a level of Roman religious life, small household shrines and neighborhood rites, that had often been overshadowed in scholarship by the better documented public state religion. Its limit is the ordinary one for ancient religion, working from fragmentary archaeological and literary evidence, so specific interpretive claims about ritual meaning are argued inferences rather than direct testimony from participants.