Lares, Penates, Manes. The Lares were tutelary deities belonging originally to the Etruscan religion, and worshipped especially as the protectors of a particular locality. In Roman usage they were usually regarded as the tutelary deities of a house (familiars or domestici), and their images stood on the hearth in a little shrine (aedes), or in a small chapel (lararium). We find also Lares compitales (of cross-roads), Lares vicorum (of streets), Lares rurales (of the country), &c. See ANCESTOR WORSHIP.
The Penates were the old Latin guardian deities of the household, and of the state regarded as a union of households. Their seat was originally in Lavinium, and the name is generally joined with Di. By a natural enough case of metonymy both the words Penates and Lares came to be used as equivalent to a home or a hearth.
The Manes were the deified souls of the departed, the gods of the Lower World considered as benevolent spirits, in contrast to larve and lemures, malevolent spirits; but the name frequently applied merely to the departed spirit, ghost, or shade of a dead person.
These divinities were by no means exactly differentiated from each other, and obviously all owed their existence to the fundamental ideas underlying the worship of ancestors, with its altar, the domestic hearth—the most persistent and perhaps the oldest of all the religions of man.