Lares

Roman guardian spirits of the house, the crossroads and the city. Virgil keeps the Latin word when Hector's ghost hands Aeneas "her Lares and her people", and Livy's Albans leave "their hearths and household gods"; what the Lares were — ancestors, hearth-guardians, protectors of place — the primary texts here do not explain, so the definition is drawn from the encyclopaedic record.