1 The terms “syncretism” and “syncretistic” are here used in the neutral sense of Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, “Du ‘bon usage’ de la notion de syncrétisme,” Kernos 7 (1997) 11–27.

2 The following abbreviations will be used in what follows: HA = Historia Augusta; HA AS = Historia Augusta Alexander Severus; HA Hel. = Historia Augusta Heliodorus; HA P = Historia Augusta Pertinax; HA Aurelian = Historia Augusta Aurelian; CIL = Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum; AE = L’Année épigraphique; SEG = Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum.

3 See, e.g., “Apollonios von Tyana,” Der neue Pauly 1:887; “Christenverfolgung,”RAC 2:1178; “Christusbild,” RAC 3:3”; “Götterbilder,” RAC 11:695; “Historia Augusta,” RAC 15:714; Severus Alexander,” EncJud 14:1200; etc.

4 See, e.g., Enrico dal Cavolo, “La politica religiosa di Alessandro Severo: Per una valutazione dei rapporti tra l’ultimo dei Severi e i Cristiani,” Salesianum 49 (1987) 359–75; and idem, I severi e il cristianesimo: Ricerche sull’ambiente storico-istituzionale delle origini cristiane tra il secondo e il terzo secolo (Rome: Las, 1989). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer whose spirited apology for the opposite position to my own demonstrates the vigor with which this alternative view can still be held. The major disagreement concerns the proper way to weigh the witness of the HA over and against reconstructions of the Severan age.

5 Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, Histoire Auguste: Vie d’Alexandre Sévère (Paris: Gallimard, 2014) 119. This terse comment in Bertrand-Dagenbach’s annotation of the text is puzzling. In her earlier essay (eadem, “Alexandre Sévère, ses héros et ses saints: ou quelques pieuses impiétés d’un bon empereur,” in Du héros païen au saint chrétien [ed. Gérard Freyburger and Laurent Pernot; Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1997] 95–103, esp. 95–96) she openly admits the fictional character (“sans rapport avec le véritable empereur”) of the information contained in the HA about Severus Alexander’s religious piety. The fourth-century context successfully elaborated in that study harmonizes perfectly with what shall be here pursued in the first section. It appears, nevertheless, that Bertrand-Dagenbach entertains a conception of the lararium report as a realizable fiction—whether in the early-third or late-fourth century (or both) is difficult to say—against which the discussion in the second section below will be especially important as a response and clarification.

6 Cristian Mondello, “Sui Lares di Severo Alessandro (HA Alex. Sev. 29, 2; 31, 4-5): fra conservazione e trasformazione,” ὅρμος, Richerche di Storia Antica 9 (2017) 189–229. Mondello’s rejection of what he understands as a “hypercritical” view does consider the archeological record, albeit it briefly, but he differs from the view espoused here in several basic ways. He lays stress essentially upon the syncretistic character of the Severan age and gives extremely little attention to the problematic character of the HA as such and to the deep ideological investments of its author. “Syncretistic” links between the specific figures involved are not here contested; such intersections are simply positioned in a cultural/literary context rather than in the traditional cultic sphere of the Roman lararium. To this extent, my judgment emphasizes literary and material factors that I find lacking or underplayed in Mondello’s treatment. His effort to find a balanced position between “conservazione e trasformazione” does, nevertheless, echo an idea argued differently here.

7 While the form of argumentation and evidence brought forward in this paper are in many ways new, the negative form of the thesis was already clearly stated in the neglected work of Karl Bihlmeyer, Die “syrischen” Kaiser zu Rom (211–35) und das Christentum: Kritische Studie (Rottenburg: Bader, 1916) 120–30.

8 Passing dismissals do appear in the literature: e.g., “Eine Erfindung des Verfassers” (Johannes Straub, Heidnische Geschichtsapologetik in der christlichen Spätantike. Untersuchungen über Zeit und Tendenz der Historia Augusta [Bonn: Habelt, 1963] 169); “très probablement. . . des inventions de l’auteur” (Joëlle Soler, “Virgile, Prophète du monothéisme dans l’antiquité tardive?,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 236 [2019] 703–30, at 723); and several insightful pages are devoted to the text in the splendid essay by Elias J. Bickerman, “Literary Forgeries in Classical Antiquity,” in Studies in Jewish and Christian History (ed. Amram Tropper; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011) 2:860–78; but a complete argument is still wanting.

9 A major methodological point of dispute concerns how to handle the two historical strata at play: the Severan vs. the Theodosian. I have determined first to treat the literary level of the HA, since, regarding the actual lararium claim itself, this textual data is primary. Whatever shape Severan syncretism may take in other sources (on which, see F. Elia, “I Severi e la questione cristiana: sincretismo religioso o realismo politico?,” QC 1 [1979] 539–63), there would be no talk of the emperor’s lararium without the HA. In a second movement, I then examine the archeological record, attempting to shed new light on the earlier historical stratum, again concentrating on lararia in particular, not syncretism at large. This material record is admittedly patchy, but the same is true for the whole exceptionally spotty record of the Severan period, upon which any defense of the tradition is inevitably based.

10 This essential insight is already briefly articulated in the foundational work of Johannes Geffcken (“Religionsgeschichtliches in der Historia Augusta,” Hermes 55 [1920] 279–95, esp. 282–83) who, in considering HA AS 29.2, rightly saw that “ein solcher Synkretismus in jener Zeit unmöglich gewesen wäre und eigentlich nur ins 4. Jahrhundert gehört” [“such a syncretism in that period would have been impossible and actually belongs only in the 4^th century”], 282): see below. The present article amplifies Geffcken’s position from multiple perspectives.

11 By a needful convention, one is dispensed from citing the immense biography on the HA. For an overview, see the “Introduction générale,” in Jean-Pierre Callu, Histoire Auguste, Tome I 1 ^re partie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992) vii–ciii. The collection of Historia Augusta Colloquium (HAC) volumes contains the largest concentrated deposit of scholarship on the subject. The frank assessment of Michael Kulikowski (Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine [Great Britain: Profile, 2018] 39) is worth quoting to conjure up the relevant concerns: “Its author [i.e., of the Historia Augusta] was a crackpot, plain and simple. He took a now lost collection of sober imperial biographies from Nerva to Caracalla (that is, from AD 96 to 217, and thus a continuation of Suetonius Tranquillus’s lives of the first twelve emperors), mixed in juicy tidbits from the rather more gossipy collection put together in the early third century by a senator named Marius Maximus, and then started to fantasize: he fabricated lives of imperial heirs apparent and when that got boring he carried on his sequence into the third century CE, with biographies of the period’s little-known and short-lived emperors that could run through forty or fifty pages of pure invention. Then, to top it off, he pretended to be six different biographers writing more than half a century before the late 390s. The reader can imagine the inordinate effort made by modern scholars panning for gold among these maddening tanks full of dross.” Other voices are more optimistic, and patient case-by-case assessment (“panning for gold”) is appropriate. The present study aims to make only a localized claim about the HA’s lararium texts, though this naturally requires certain interpretative assumptions about the larger work.

12 See, e.g., Michel Christol, L’empire romain du IIIe siècle: Histoire politique 192–325 apres J. -C. (Paris: Errance, 1997) 55; cf. Bertrand-Dagenbach, Histoire Auguste, xvi–xviii. See also, more generally, Giorgio Bonamente, “Optimi principes-divi nell’Historia Augusta,” in HAC Genevense (ed. Lavinia Galli Milic and Nicole Hecquet-Note; Bari: Edipuglia, 2010) 63–82.

13 Any source-critical attempt to reach behind HA’s lararium tradition is at best extremely hazardous. Despite much unconfirmed speculation—Syme’s Ignotus, a lost imperial history, is the most famous example—identification of the putative sources informing the HA has not resulted in any consensus. The strong redactional color documented in the present study argues against the use here of some now irretrievable source. On the phrase quantum scriptor suorum temporum dicit as a literary convention, see below.

14 “Fiction prevails, and by far, in the Life of Alexander Severus” (Bertrand-Dagenbach, Histoire Auguste, lxxiii). See also Marie A. Rubio, El valor historico de la vita Alexandri Severi en los Scriptores Historia Augustae (Monografias de historia antigua 4; Saragossa: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1988).

15 Mondello, “Lares di Severo Alessandro,” 190.

16 Geffcken, “Religionsgeschichtliches,” 279–95. Geffcken specifically signals HA AS as a religious turning point in the collection: “Nun setzt, sobald wir mit Severus Alexander aus dem Bannkreise des Marius Maximus treten, die Fälschung oder Verdrehung auf religiösem Gebiete ein” (281–82). Not all scholars have adopted Geffcken’s viewpoint, in part because Christianity appears to be a marginal phenomenon within the HA at large. See Arnaldo Momigliano, “An Unsolved Problem of Historical Forgery: The Scriptores Historiae Augustae,” JWI 17 (1954) 22–46.

17 On this period, see Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des derniers païens: La disparition du paganisme dans l’Empire romain, du règne de Constantin à celui de Justinien (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011). See also, e.g., the case study and bibliography of Giorgio Ferri, “The Last Dance of the Salians: The Pagan Élite of Rome and Christian Emperors in the Fourth Century AD,” Millenium: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr. 12 (2015) 117–54.

18 See, e.g., Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, “Historia Augusta contra Christianos II: nouvelles considérations sur la ΠAIΔEIA païenne et sur l’ambiance antichrétienne dans l’Histoire Auguste,” Antiquité Tardive 24 (2016) 257–84; and Jean-Fabrice Nardelli and Stéphane Ratti, “Historia Augusta contra Christianos: recherches sur l’ambiance antichrétienne dans l’Histoire Auguste,” Antiquité Tardive 22 (2014) 143–55. I see no reason to bow to objections that would force a choice between supposedly exclusive aims, opting between the HA’s manifest playfulness and signs of its politically serious commitments. Were Aristophanes’s outrageous inventions empty of concrete political force or Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis split between the absurd fable and the political lampoon? Is Jonathan Swift just an imaginative raconteur, with no clear political motives, or the raucous, logorrheic tales of Rabelais void of strong views on the politics of the day? The general mood of the satirist suits the author of the HA well, with his irreverent mix of ridiculous distraction and poignant ideas. This perspective helps moderate excessive notions about the HA’s set agenda, addressing concern about Christianity’s marginality in the work’s wider project without abandoning important interpretative insights that have been won on this front.

19 We confront “le portrait d’Alexandre Sévère sous les couleurs d’un champion païen par opposition avec le barbare Héliogabale” (Nardelli, “Nouvelles considérations,” 269). See also Bertrand-Dagenbach, “Quelques pieuses impiétés,” Du héros païen, 100.

20 Bertrand-Dagenbach, “Quelques pieuses impiétés,” 100. See also Lellia Cracco-Ruggini, “Elgabalo, Costantino e i culti ‘siriaci’ nella Historia Augusta,” in HAC Parisinum (ed. G. Bonamente and N. Duval; Macerata: Università degli Studi, 1991) 123–46.

21 For the critically established Latin text of the HA, I follow throughout the Belles Lettres editions. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

22 “Dans la centralisation théocratique imputé à Héliogabale, c’est le christianisme même qui est intégré, absorbé par une sorte de monothéisme païen absolutisé à ses dépens : revanche rétrospective de l’imaginaire sur l’actualité!” (“In the theocratic centralization attributed to Heliogabalus, it is Christinaity itself that is integrated, absorbed by a sort of pagan monotheism absolutized at its expense: retrospective revenge of the imaginary on reality!”) (Robert Turcan, Histoire Auguste, Tome III, 1 ^ere partie: Vies de Macrin, Diaduménien, Héliogabale [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993] 164). If the scene is imaginable as a kind of polytheistic literary revenge, this does not excuse Heliogabalus’s behavior in the author’s eyes. The emperor is guilty of every sordid manner of sacrilege, abomination, and ritual crime (cf. HA Hel. 4.1–12.4), including raping a Vestal virgin, trying to extinguish the sacred fire, profaning and plundering multiple temples, and offering human sacrifice.

23 See, e.g., Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire (trans. Annabel Bedini; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986; repr., London: Routledge, 1994) 88–91.

24 Jacques Schwartz (“Une fantasie impie dans l‘Histoire Auguste,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 69 [1989] 481–83) sees a blasphemous twist on the Golden Rule in the HA AS 51.5–7, but this seems to overstate the intention of the (real) irony. Cf. Bertrand-Dagenbach, “Quelques pieuses impiétés,” 99.

25 “Wenn man bedenkt, daß gerade mit Kap. 29 der Abschnitt de vita cottidiana et domestica (Alexandri) beginnt, der erwiesenermaßen von Fälschungen und Erdichtungen wimmelt und Alexanders Gestalt in der Weise eines schablonenhaften byzantinischen Heiligenbildes übermalt, wird man bei unserer Notiz Kap. 29, 2 doppelt vorsichtig sein müssen” (“If one considers that chap. 29 marks the beginning of the section de vita cottidiana et domestica [Alexandri], which is demonstrably full of fogeries and fabrications and overdraws Alexander the Great’s portrait in the fashion of a sterotypical Byzantine saintly image, one will need to be doubly cautious with our note at chap. 29.2”), Bihlmeyer, Die “syrischen” Kaiser, 127.

26 The idiom rem divinam facere is a technical expression for “offer sacrifice,” cf. CIL XI, 4766; IX, 3513; also, e.g. HA AS 57.1

27 On the phrase animas sanctiores, see the remarks of Bertrand-Dagenbach, “Quelques pieuses impiétés,” 102.

28 Salvatore Settis, “Severo Alessandro e i suoi Lari (S.H.A., S.A. 29, 2–3),” Athenaeum 50 (1972) 327–51.

29 Nardelli, “Nouvelles considérations,” 268.

30 See A. Dubourdieu, “Domestic Cults, Cultes domestiques, Hauskulte,” TCRA 8:38. The word was potentially available by the second quarter of the third century, yet even in this case it would first appear only after Severus Alexander’s death, during the reign of Maximinus Thrax, in one isolated inscription from Vitola (CIL IX 2125). One must be cautious with this very fragmentary text, however, which is incomplete at the critical point, has been alternately read as LARẸ [. . . or LARẠ]. . ., and which is not obviously speaking about a home shrine, whatever the reconstruction. The inscription appears on the plinth of an altar bearing the image of a grotesque figure.

31 Alexandra Sofroniew, Household Gods: Private Devotion in Ancient Greece and Rome (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015) 33. On concrete devotion to the Lares, understood not as spirits of the dead but benevolent protectors, see Harriet Flower, The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

32 “Lampridius ist sich offenbar selbst bewusst, hier etwas Besonderes und Auffallendes gesagt zu haben, daher die Berufung auf den gut unterrichteten Gewährsmann. . . er will sich den Schein tiefer Gelehrsamkeit und gediegener historischen Kritik geben” (“Lampridius is obviously aware that he has said something special and noteworthy here, hence the reference to the well-informed authority. . . he means to give the appearance of profound learning and sound historical criticism”) (Bihlmeyer, Die “syrischen” Kaiser, 121).

33 “Philostratus’s account follows a pattern of ‘self-authentication’ that has many parallels in ancient and modern literature. A hitherto known witness writes his memoirs, these are mysteriously discovered and given to some authority figure. . . Philostratus probably expects sophisticated readers to recognize this friendly Protesilaos [i.e. the putative source invoked On Heroes] as a harmless invention of his own, and the same may be assumed to be true of Damis [i.e. the putative source invoked in the Life of Apollonius]” (Philostratus: Apollonius of Tyana, Books I–IV [ed. and trans. Christopher P. Jones; LCL 16; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005] 6).

34 See Marion Giebel, Vergil (Reinbek bei Hamburg: RoRoRo, 2011) 124. See also Soler, “Prophète du monothéisme,” 703–30, esp. 723; and Chuvin, Derniers païens, 157–64. Proclus in his Hymn to All the Gods (IV, 5–6) prays that “divine books” might descend to him from heaven to reveal the true light.

35 See The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C.J. Putnam; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) 467–68; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 567–625; and especially the study of Yves de Kisch (“Les Sortes Vergilianae dans l’Histoire Auguste,” Mélanges de l’école franćaise de Rome 82 [1970] 321–62), which shows how committed HA is to promoting a set of late fourth-century, polytheistic cultural/religious values through this motif of Vergilian bibliomancy. Obviously, appealing to the HA as evidence that the sortes vergilianae were widely in use by Roman emperors already by the age of the Antonines, and thus plausible practice for Severus Alexander, cannot be accepted as a simple proof of the historical fact; pace Helen Loane, “The Sortes Vergilianae,” The Classical Weekly 21.24 (1928) 185–89, at 185.

36 As Betrand-Dagenbach (“Quelques pieuses impiétés,” 98) notes, the phrase clearly echoes and turns around Cicero’s description of Plato as the “Homer of philosophers.” See also Ziolkowski, Virgilian Tradition, 463–66.

37 See Romane Memento: Vergil in the Fourth Century (ed. Roger Rees; London: Duckworth, 2004). See also Stéphane Ratti, “La signification antichrétienne des oracles de Virgile dans l’Histoire Auguste,” in HAC Dusseldorpiense (ed. Bruno Bleckmann and Hartwin Brandt; Bari: Edipuglia, 2017) 139–54.

38 So Bertrand-Dagenbach, Histoire Auguste, 70 n. 66.

39 See especially Diederik W. P. Burgersdijk, “Cicero and the Historia Augusta,” in HAC Turicense (ed. Samuel Zinsli and Gunther Martin; Bari: Edipuglia, 2021) 39–55, here 39 and 40.

40 See ibid., “Cicero,” 10–11.

41 See Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero (ed. William Altmann; Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception 2; Leiden: Brill, 2015).

42 John Bodel, “Cicero’s Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion,” in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 248–75.

43 The same pattern of conjoint veneration of these heroes is attested for Caracalla by Herodian, Hist. 4.8.3–4.

44 See Edmond van’t Dack, “Achille dans l’HA,” Bonner HAC (ed. Eric Birley et al.; Bonn: Habelt, 1991) 61–80.

45 See Edmond van’t Dack, “Alexandre le Grand dans l’HA: Vita Severi Alexandri 30.3 et 50.5,” in Bonner HAC (ed. Eric Birley et al; Bonn: Habelt, 1991) 41–60; and José María Blázquez, “Alejandro Magno, modelo de Alejandro Severo,” in Neronia IV: Alejandro model des los emperadores romanos (ed. J. M. Croisille; Brussels: Peeters, 1990) 25–36.

46 Shifting Roman views on veneration of Alexander the Great can be seen by comparing the respective accounts of Curtius Rufus who, writing in the first century CE, strongly condemns Alexander’s assumption of divine honors and Arrian who, under the Antonines, easily accepts the conqueror’s claims.

47 See Jones, Philostratus, 2–5, 17–18.

48 See Alessandro Galimberti, “La vita di Apollonio di Tiana e Caracalla: cronologia e contesto storico,” Aevum 88 (2014) 125–36.

49 See Doron Bar, “Continuity and Change in the Cultic Topography of Late Antique Palestine,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter; Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 163; Leiden: Brill, 2008) 284–85.

50 See Bertrand-Dagenbach, “Quelques pieuses impiétés,” 96.

51 Jones, Philostratus, 18. On the basis of a passage in Sidonius Apollonaris (Letters 8.3.1), Nicomachus Flavianus has been thought to have translated Philostratus’s earlier bios into Latin, but this passage has now been reinterpreted as speaking only of a Greek transcription. See Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen, The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (AD 300–620) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 51–53.

52 Above all, see Christopher Jones, “Apollonius of Tyana in Late Antiquity,” in Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (ed. Scott F. Johnson; London: Routledge, 2006) 49–66.

53 See Timothy D. Barnes, “Sossianus Hierokles and the Antecedents of the ‘Great Persecution,’ ” HSCP 80 (1976) 239–52.

54 The authorship of the treatise has recently become a matter of debate, with several voices arguing against the traditional Eusebian attribution. See Aaron Johnson, “The Author of the Against Hierocles: A Response to Borzì and Jones,” JTS 64 (2013) 574–94; Philostratus: Apollonius of Tyana: Letters, Volume III (ed. and trans. and Christopher P. Jones; LCL 458; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2006) 147–53.

55 LCL 458:156–57.

56 Jones, “Late Antiquity,” 49.

57 Ibid., 56.

58 See Andreas Alföldi, Die Kontorniaten. Ein verkanntes Propagandamittel der Städtrömischen heidnischen Aristokratie in ihrem Kampfe gegen das christliche Kaisertum (Budapest: Magyar Numismatikai Tarsulat, 1943).

59 Alföldi’s interpretation of the contorniates and its recent reassessment is discussed by Peter Franz Mittag, Alte Köpfe in neuen Händen. Urheber und Funktion der Kontorniaten (Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 1999); and idem, “Alföldi and the Contorniates,” in Andreas Alföldi in the Twenty First Century (ed. James H. Richardson and Federico Santangelo; HABES 36; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2015) 259–68.

60 “One of the many paradoxes of the study of Orphism is that, although most of our preserved Orphic testimonies and fragments date from the Imperial period, research has been focused primarily upon its early existence in Classical times,” Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity (Sozomena 7; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010) 31.

61 Ibid., 73.

62 On this, see ibid., 64–68.

63 Ibid., 62.

64 “All the Orphic material that has appeared in Rome always presents a clear ‘foreign’ tone, occurring in inscriptions in Greek and associated with the Pythagorean tradition or with Greek or Eastern deities” (ibid., 73).

65 “Evidence from Roman art and literature shows that by this period the Orpheus of religion and the Orpheus of legend had become separated, only the figure of the latter, poet and singer, occurring in art” (Janet Huskinson, “Some Pagan Mythological Figures and Their Significance in Early Christian Art,” Papers of the British School at Rome 42 [1974] 68–97, at 70).

66 See Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity, 123 and pl. 3 on 126.

67 Ibid., 124.

68 See the helpful survey of household religion provided in David Orr, “Roman Domestic Religion: The Evidence of Household Shrines,” ANRW 16.2:1557–1590; also Sofroniew, Household Gods. On the huge body of evidence from Pompeiii, see above all George K. Boyce, Corpus of the Lararia of Pompeii (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1937); and, more recently, Michael Lipka, “Notes on Pompeian Domestic Cults,” Numen 53 (2006) 327–58; and Maddalena Bassani, Sacraria: Ambienti e piccol edifice per il culto domestico in area vesuviana (Antenor Quaderni 9; Rome: Quasar, 2008).

69 See the good contextual description offered in Sofroniew, Household Gods, 28–31.

70 For images, see ibid., 30–31, 40. Many variations exist: e.g., snakes alone, Lares alone, Lares without snakes, genius alone, genius and Lares without snakes, penates with genius and Lares, penates alone, etc. On these sacral frescos in general, see Thomas Fröhlich, Lararien und Fassadenbilder in den Vesuvstädten. Untersuchungen zur “volkstümlichen” pompejanischen Malerei (Mainz: von Zabern, 1991), esp. the analytic catalogue beginning on 343 and listing of statuettes beginning on 356.

71 An annotated photo of such a wall painting is presented in Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Vol. 2: A Sourcebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 102–3 (4.12). See also the 64 illustrations richly reproduced in Fröhlich, Lararien, beginning on 371.

72 Federica Giacobello, Larari pompeiani: Iconografia e culto dei lari in ambito domestico (Il filarete/Università degli studi di Milano, Facoltà di lettere e filosofia 251; Milan: LED, 2008).

73 On the images of ancestors, see Marie-Odile Charles-Laforge, “Imagines Maiorum et portraits d’ancêtres à Pompéi,” in Contributi di archeologia vesuviana III (ed. Lorenzo Barnabei; Studi della Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei 17; Rome: L’Erma, 2007) 158–71.

74 Fröhlich, Lararien, F60 and F66. On the figurines, see Adamo Muscettola, “Osservazione sulla composizione dei larari con statuette in bronzo di Pompei ed Ercalano,” in Toreutik und figürliche Bronzen römischr Zeit. Akten der 6. Tagung über antike Bronzen (ed. Ulrich Gehrig; Berlin: SMPK, 1980) 9–32.

75 See Boyce, Lararia of Pompeii, pl. 31.1.

76 Walters Art Museum, inv. 57.747–752. See Boyce, Lararia of Pompeii, 500.

77 Amy Russel, “The Altars of the Lares Augusti: A View from the Streets of Augustan Iconography,” in The Social Dynamics of Roman Imperial Imagery (ed. Amy Russell and Monika Hellström; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 21–51. “The princeps himself donated new cult images of the Lares to each vicus” (26).

78 Suetonius: Lives of the Caesars, Volume I (trans. J. C. Rolfe; LCL 31; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pess, 1914) 156–69.

79 Mondello (“Lares di Severo Alessandro,” 197) fails to appreciate the specific literary context and imperial cult connections in these examples from Suetonius, unconvincingly reckoning them as adequate precedent for the images of culture-hero (rather than simply the unnamed imperial divi) in the lararia recounted in HA.

80 On the data from Spain and Delos, see Orr, “Roman Domestic Religion,” 1588. On the recently-discovered, late-first-century lararium in Apollonia-Arsuf, see Israel Roll and Oren Tal, “A Villa in the Early Roman Period at Apollonia-Arsuf,” IEJ 58 (2008) 132–49, esp. 140; and also the visualizations proposed by Gillikin Schoueri and Marco Teixira-Bastos, “A Theoretical Framework for Informal 3D Rendered Analysis of the Roman Lararium from Apollonia Arsuf,” Open Archeology 7 (2021) 499–518, esp. 508–10.

81 Fröhlich, Lararien, F60, Taf. 60,3 and F66, Taf. 60,1.

82 Fröhlich, Lararien, 155–60 (cf. Taf. 13.2; 38.1; 47.1).

83 Fröhlich, Lararien, 356; cf. Boyce, Lararia of Pompeii, 53.

84 See Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, Götter und Larien aus Augusta Raurica. Herstellung, Fundzusammenhänge und sakrale Funktion figürlicher Brozen in einer römischen Stadt (Forschungen in Augst 26; Augst: Römermuseum, 1998).

85 See Orr, “Roman Domestic Religion,” 1587.

86 Kaufmann-Heinimann, Götter und Larien, 193.

87 Nardelli “provisionally contends that the disinclination of the HA from the very start to be accurate in historical matters was modelled on the falsehood-ridden Lives of the saints so widespread in the late 4^th century” (“Nouvelles considérations,” 257).

88 Much later (13^th and 14^th cent.) medieval legends also associate Vergil with magic statues and figurines but as the fabricator of such talismans, not as a depicted object of devotion. See Ziolkowski, Virgilian Tradition, 867–74.

89 Bihlmeyer, Die “syrischen” Kaiser, 129.

90 In Hebron, in Iudea/Palestina, a form of Abraham devotion existed, but the cult of this local holy site appears to have had very limited reach.

91 See Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991) 14; and Kurt Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1979) 406–11.

92 On the Jewish Orpheus image in Dura-Europos, see the interpretative debate briefly recounted in Erwin Goodenough, “The Orpheus in the Synagogue of Dura-Europos: A Correction,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 21 (1958) 372.

93 On this much studied motif in early Christian art, see Lexicon der christlichen Ikonographie (ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum and Wolfgang Braunfels; 8 vols.; Freiberg im Breisgau: Herder, 1968–1976) 2:289–99; on “Jonah,” LCI 2:414–21; on “Orpheus,” LCI 3:357–58.

94 A methodological issue is implied in this formulation insofar as a Christ out of context might well be indiscernible as Christ. A rare illustration of extra-cultic depiction of Christ from the Roman context (probably mid-third century CE) is the beautiful golden Good Shepherd ring found off the Caesarean coast in Israel and just announced by the IAA in December 2021.

95 See John Granger Cook, “Alleged Christian Crosses at Herculaneum and Pompeii,” VC 72 (2008) 1–20.

96 So Granger Cook, “Alleged Christian Crosses” and Orr, “Roman Domestic Religion,” 1585.

97 A close crossing of Christ-devotion sans image and traditional Roman domestic religion does appear in a 3^rd-cent. military installation at Legio in Palestine, where a bronze figurine of a Lar was found in the “Southern Building,” not far distant from the Christian Prayer Hall in the “Northern Building” where the inscription of a Christian centurion and a eucharistic trapeza dedicated to “God Jesus Christ” were uncovered. Although the base and barracks must have served for Christian soldiers, the entire unit was surely not Christian and there is no conclusive reason either to suppose or to reject continued devotion to the Lares among those at the site devoted to Christ. See Yotam Tepper and Leah Di Segni, Christian Prayer Hall of the Third Century CE at Kefar‘Othnay (Legio): Excavations at the Megiddo Prison 2005 (Jerusalem: IAA, 2006).

98 Varro says “individual families ought to worship the gods as the state does communally,” cited in Bodel, “Mother of the Lares,” 249.

99 Cicero: On the Republic. On the Laws (trans. Clinton W. Keyes; LCL 213; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928) 392–93. Cicero was ready to admit that Isis and Serapis count among the ancestral deities whose worship was proper to the ideal state; cf. De natura deorum 3.47.

100 See Bodel, “Mother of the Lares,” 251.

101 See the discussion in Chuvin, Derniers païens, 135–54. One confronts, in fact, in this particular cultural configuration an “amalgame de ce que nous séparons en «science», «religion» et «superstition»” (157).

102 Emphasizing the library likeness rather than the syncretistic context is the essential insight of Settis, “Severo Alessandro,” 237–51.

103 The HA was already late in the day, but it was not the last attempt. Chuvin (Derniers païens, 135–52) demonstrates well the “ténacité de l’orient” and the vigor with which polytheists were still resisting, even down to the late 6^th century.