Household Gods: Private Devotion in Ancient Greece and Rome

Love. Love. Love. This is more of a coffee table book with dozens of beautiful photographs of ancient artifacts but it has tons of information on the subject of household worship. This book was actually more in-depth than I expected and dealt with public worship, too, although the primary focus is on domestic worship, shrine construction, and household deities specific to Greek and Roman religions, exploring how the ancient people actually believed and practiced their faiths in private. The book is divided into different aspects of life, from wealth and health to protection and romance and the gods worshiped in those arenas of life from Hellenistic Egypt to Greece to Rome.

Ancient authors didn't have much to say about household worship - why describe what everyone does? - and modern scholars have long followed their example. But the archeological evidence is there, with preserved domestic shrines (mostly in Pompeii and Herculaneum) and many small statues manufactured to go in them. This book presents that evidence with a wealth of coloured pictures and a very readable text. In the final chapter the author shows us, for comparison, modern household shrines in the Hindu and Chinese traditions. This book is obviously aimed at the general reader, but it will be of value to students of classics, art history, or the phenomenology of religion, and also to modern polytheists (like myself) with their own shrines to assemble. The generosity of the Getty Museum must be acknowledged, in publishing such a beautiful hardback at such a modest price.