ANTÈRO, father. — Funerary inscription — Rome, cemetery of S. Callisto.
(Int. Pont. Comm. d'Arc. note)
great solemnity by the mihado, especially at the solemn moments of national life.
The ancestors, invoked as “fathers,” receive a solemn cult in ancient India, a cult that constitutes the first of the duties incumbent upon survivors, pindapitryajna, that is, “sacrifice of the cake (śraddā) to the fathers.” This consists in offering three of these cakes upon a layer of grass before a fire placed to the south, the region of the dead. The Fravati of the Iranians, now regarded as the sanctified souls of the just, were originally the spirits of the ancestors.
Nicola Turchi
Among the Greeks, traces of it are very scant. They are entirely absent in Homer, which is readily explained by the fact that the milieu for which the rhapsodists sang was still too little rooted in the soil (they sang chiefly in seafaring cities) for a cult of the ancestors to develop there. Later, too, the superimposition of the democratic State upon the primitive gentile constitution, the development of urban life, and above all the sense of individuality, so overwhelmingly vigorous among the Greeks and eventually leading to the cult of heroes, rendered it very weak. We must nevertheless perhaps see a trace of it in the festival of the Apaturia (v.). Among the Romans, we have slight but nevertheless undeniable traces of the cult of the ancestors in the religious figure of the di Manes. In a later period, the di Manes are conceived either as infernal divinities (in Greek βαίμονος κατωχθόνοι) or as the soul of a particular deceased person; but the use of the plural itself—a formula which, in strict logical terms, makes no sense when it designates a single individual—and the fact that the festivals sacred to the Manes are private, even though made obligatory by the laws of the State, demonstrate that the Manes were originally the ancestors of individual peoples. That the household Lares should be identified with the spirits of the ancestors is probable, but not certain; more probable, though this too is not certain, is that the imagines maiorum, preserved in the atria of the houses of the gentes, were originally objects of worship on the part of the members of the gens. For the cult of ancestors among primitive peoples V. PRIMITIVI, RELIGIONE DEI.