182 PHOENIX The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. By Harriet I. Flower. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2017. Pp. xiii, 394, 24 color and 70 b/w illustrations. In the mid-1800s King Ludwig i of Bavaria had a splendid Roman house, loosely modeled on the House of the Dioscuri in Pompeii, built in the city of Aschaffenburg. Hidden in the corners of the Pompejanum are references to Roman domestic religion: a winged snake decorates a kitchen wall, an altar is tucked away to the side of the atrium, and a small room acts as a lararium. The gods of the lararium, the Lares, are the focus of Harriet Flower’s rich and beautifully illustrated book. By surveying a wide range of evidence, it offers a compelling and coherent picture of how the Lares can fit into our wider picture of Roman society. This is the first comprehensive book-length investigation of the Lares, the (usually twin) deities that were worshipped in Roman households, at crossroads, and on property boundaries in the countryside. Unlike the major Roman gods, the Lares do not have a rich mythology associated with them and no detailed literary treatment survives. While the material remains of their worship have received attention from archaeologists, works on Roman religion tend to have little to say about the Lares.1 It may therefore seem surprising that a book would focus only on the Lares. At first glance the geographical and chronological focus also seem narrow: the book primarily concerns itself with the city of Rome with excursions to Pompeii, and, on one occasion, Delos.2 Many of the sources under discussion date to the late republic and the Augustan period. But, as Flower shows, if we look hard enough, the twin gods are everywhere: from fragments of material evidence to short references in inscriptions and literary texts, there are glimpses of the Romans interacting with these gods in settings ranging from private worship to shrines that served as rallying points during political disputes. The book looks at all these pieces of evidence and asks why the Lares were so popular. The study is divided into four parts, each grouping together several chapters of varying lengths. A preface summarizes the structure of the book and its intellectual aims, an epilogue considers the fate of the Lares in the Christian empire and three appendices provide, among other things, a list of all mentions of the Lares in Roman authors. The text is copiously illustrated throughout with both halftone images and color plates. Part One provides an overview of the various topics and approaches of the work. As stated in the preface, the book aims to show “how far we as modern researchers can rediscover and understand traditional Roman religion independent of pervasive comparisons and contrasts with various monotheisms” (ix). At the start of Part One, it is 1 Scholars tend to focus on either the domestic worship of the gods or their role in more public cults. So the Lares Compitales and the Lares Augusti receive a brief discussion in M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge 1998), but there is no significant reference to the Lares in domestic religion. R. Parker and K. Bowes in R. Raja and J. Rüpke (eds.), A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World (Malden, MA 2015), on the other hand, focus on domestic worship. J. Bodel, “Cicero’s Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion,” in J. Bodel and S. M. Olyan (eds.), Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Oxford 2008) 248–275, takes a broader approach to the various manifestations of the Lares and is thereby an intellectual precursor to the book under review, if on a different scale. 2 Those interested in provincial Lares will therefore have to start with case studies, for example, M. I. Portela Filgueiras, “Los dioses lares en la Hispania romana,” Lucentum 3 (1984) 153–180; A. Kaufmann-Heinimann, Götter und Lararien aus Augusta Raurica (Augst 1998). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 183 not only the Christianizing lens that is cast aside: republican...