In Part I “Lar(es)/Genius and Juno/Snake(s),” Flower focuses on who the lares were and how they were depicted. She points out the ways in which ancient and modern scholars have been misled in viewing the lares as spirits of the dead and deconstructs any evidence used to associate the lares and the underworld. Instead she argues that the lares are gods of place, protecting the spaces in which Romans lived. The lares are distinctly Roman deities. It is because of their Romanness, Flower argues, that there is a dearth of discussion about them in our sources since these traditional deities did not need to be explained to a Roman audience.

In the absence of an origin story to confirm the basic nature of the deities as “gods of place,” Flower focuses on what extant evidence can tell us about how the Romans experienced the lares and their cult in everyday life. She walks through literary evidence about lares in domestic spaces (sections ii-iv) before turning to the houses and streets of Pompeii (sections iv-viii). Though she cautions that paintings from the Bay of Naples are influenced by their local environment and are not representative of any kind of “standard” Roman imagery, she adeptly uses the Campanian walls to contextualize and explain literary mentions of lares by focusing on the snakes depicted alongside them. Wall paintings from the Bay of Naples portray the lares as a lively pair of twins in tunics often dancing and receiving a libation from the genius of a householder. A separate illustration complements this picture of domestic ritual: a depiction of a natural, garden-like space occupied by one or two snakes who receive their own offering. While there is no mention of the relationship between the lares and snakes in our literary evidence, Flower argues that the snakes represent the genius of the natural environment (genius loci). As “gods of place” over wild and uncultivated space, the snakes offer a contrast to the lares, different “gods of place” who protect the domestic and civic spheres of men. Flower suggests that together the lares and snakes offer us a glimpse into the imagined “sacred landscape” of a Roman religious world absent of Greek mythology.

In part II, “Shrines for the Lares in Rome,” Flower moves beyond the domestic sphere and examines the various shrines and cult sites constructed for the lares in civic contexts. The extant material evidence, largely from Pompeii, shows that lares could be found and worshipped at a public temple (aedes), a street corner (compitum), or a small open-air shrine (sacellum), in addition to household spaces. As she analyzes these different types of spaces, Flower points to the ways that the built environment manifests the “sacred landscape” of the Roman imaginary. Among the spaces Flower examines, the compital shrines, those situated where two or more roads cross each other, represent the quotidian locations of these cultic sites. The crossroad shrine was the “place of worship where the largest cross section of Roman society could (at least potentially) perform common ritual actions, regardless of the social status, ethnicity, or gender, simply on the basis of living locally” (p. 116). Because no crossroad shrine has been found in situ in Rome, Pompeii serves, again, as a case study for the general popularity and layout of the compita. This part of her work, with its close attention to the built urban landscape, serves as a backdrop upon which her discussion of the celebration and celebrators of the lares at the annual midwinter festival, Compitalia, is set.