A few days after the Kalends of January, they celebrate another festival, the Compitalia.

Although this day is dedicated to the Lares of the crossroads, the Lares of the household must not be neglected. Before dawn, while it is still dark, Pompeia rings a bell to summon her children and slaves to the household shrine. The two painted wooden figurines in the niche seem to dance in the flickering light of a beeswax candle.

Pompeia hands out the dolls and balls to be hung from the lintel of the door.

To her son Superbus, she gives the wooden doll that he has had since his coming of age.

Fabia and Pompeia have similar dolls but with long hair, to show that they are female.

The slaves get balls of wool dangling from a woollen loop.

Pompeia prides herself on knowing the qualities of her slaves.

She gives Scumnicolus a ball of dark wool because his temperament is melancholic. Coquus gets yellow wool because he is hot-tempered. Amarantus gets red and blue mixed together because he is cheerful but also easy-going: sanguine and phlegmatic. Pompeia thought for quite a while before making Grata’s ball, but finally she made it lavender, and scented it, too. Grata’s own temperament has not yet emerged from the shock of enslavement but Pompeia suspects she is phlegmatic with perhaps a tinge of melancholic.

As Pompeia hands out the balls, she hears Grata murmur to Amarantus, ‘Why do we get balls and not dolls?’

‘Slaves get balls. You only get a doll if you’re born free or set free,’ he whispers. ‘Boy dolls for men and girl dolls for women.’

Grata replies, ‘If our master had set you free, then you would have a wooden boy doll?’

He nods. In the candlelight Pompeia sees Grata blink back tears. ‘I am so sorry!’

‘Never speak of it again,’ whispers Amarantus. ‘It was not your fault. I told you that you could eat, and you only followed my advice.’

This confirms what Pompeia has long suspected: Amarantus took the blame for Grata’s theft of the honey. If not for her, he would be hanging a freedman’s doll rather than a slave’s ball. It astonishes her that he shows no resentment.

As they go out the front door, the pale light of dawn shows her next-door-neighbour Valeria Volusa hanging dolls and balls from the top of her door, too. Pompeia and Valeria call greetings to each other.

It is a clear, cold morning. A glaze of frost makes the roof tiles pink and the road slippery. Many people are already queuing to watch the heads of the households leave a special cake at a crossroads shrine on the north-east corner of their insula. Every- one is wearing their warmest clothes. Some stamp their feet and slap their arms with their hands.

Before they join the queue that goes up the road past Mestrius’s house and Papilio’s workshop, Pompeia gives each member of her familia one of the special finger-shaped cakes baked by Coquus. Grata lifts her cake to her mouth and then hesitates, ‘Yes, you can eat yours,’ says Pompeia with a smile. ‘The Lares only ask one cake per household.’

‘Is it made with honey?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then may I also offer my honey-cake to the Lares?’

‘No, it is for the head of the household to do. But you could give it to someone else who might like it.’ Pompeia inclines her head towards Sophe, standing forlornly to one side.

Grata holds out the cake to Sophe and raises her eyebrows. The beggar girl is there in an instant, eyes shining. She devours the cake and sucks the honey from her grubby fingers.

Valeria is in the queue ahead of them with her four children and two female slaves. Her marriage is a success because her husband and his two young male slaves spend most of the time at the country farm just outside Nuceria. Pompeia wants to chat but Valeria is busy comforting her youngest boy. He slipped on a patch of ice and is now wailing.

When their part of the queue finally reaches the shrine, Pompeia places her cake reverently on the altar along with a dozen more, and then looks at the two painted Lares with affection. As a Roman matron, she doesn’t often come out here. But she grew up in this insula and as a girl she sometimes offered to fetch water for a chance to get outside and hear the other girls’ gossip. She has known these Lares all her life.

She kisses the fingertips of her right hand and touches their painted faces, now blurred by ten thousand similar kisses.

Grata imitates her and also transfers kisses by fingertips to their faces. Pompeia finds this strangely moving.

‘Do you like our Lares?’ she asks the girl

‘I like the Lares very much,’ says Grata to Pompeia as they move on to let others worship. ‘They look like my big brothers.’

Pompeia nods and says, ‘When I got married at the age of fourteen, I had to leave my dolls and toys on this altar. I had a special purse with three little copper coins.’

‘Asses,’ says Grata who sometimes serves at the bar and has been learning to make change.

‘Yes! And when I reached the shrine at the crossroads of my new home, I had to put my three asses in the moneybox there. All Lares are kind, but the ones at my husband’s shrine always seemed rather solemn. I was happy to return to these joyful ones.’

‘But who are they?’ asks Grata. ‘Who are the Lares?’

‘Nobody knows exactly,’ Pompeia pulls her palla more tightly around her shoulders. ‘All we know is that they are very ancient. Some say their mother was called Lara or Muta. She was so talkative that the god took out her tongue and made her mute. Her twin sons the Lares are mute, too. But they guard all the people in their neighbourhood, even you slaves. Also, they love to pour wine and dance.’

A loud cheer announces the arrival of the pig and the vicomagister. The pig, wearing a red band of cloth around his middle, has been brought in from the country by Valeria Volusa’s husband. The creature trots behind Valeria’s husband and the vicomagister. As usual the vicomagister is an ex-slave, newly freed. His name is Faventius and he has opened a small barber’s shop in the front of his patron’s property just a few doors down on the other side of Arena Street. He makes a good speech thanking the Lares for their protection and he asks that they accept the gift of a pig, who has just completed a circuit of the insula. A fire pit is already set up on the left of the altar.

The victimarius, the man who will cut the pig’s throat, steps forward. He holds a patera – a flat round bowl – and is flanked by two boys, one with a cleaver and one with a mallet. The priest pulls a fold of his toga over his head and asks the Lares to accept this offering.

Swiftly the mallet falls, the knife cuts and the priest catches some of the pig’s blood in his patera. It was a good sacrifice. The pig did not even squeal.

‘What do we do now, mistress?’ asks Grata.

‘Now,’ says Pompeia, ‘we will dance around the boundary of our insula, greeting those from other neighbourhoods. When we get back here the smaller portions of the pig will be ready to eat. The feast will last all day and there will be games, poems, footraces and dancing.’

‘Dancing?’ says Grata. ‘Even slaves?’

‘Yes,’ says Pompeia. ‘Freeborn and slave alike. Dancing is one of our ways of thanking the gods, and the Lares show us how to do it.’