"Lares and penates" nghĩa là gì?

"Lares and penates" = ông táo và các gia thần -> nghĩa là vật quý tạo thành ngôi nhà; mái ấm.

Ví dụ

Perhaps a century after Evander was thought to have arrived, the Trojan exile Aeneas was also said to have arrived to found Rome. Indeed, Aeneas did not arrive until after the Greeks had captured and burned Troy. He brought with him the palladium (vật hộ mệnh), the Trojan cultus (phần nghi lễ tôn giáo) statue of Athena, and the Lares and Penates, statues of the household gods of Troy, all of which became sacred relics (di tích) of the Roman world.

They were both cosseted only children of the suburban middle class born in the early 1920s. Amis emerged as a symbol of this generation. My father had a special regard for Amis’s work—most of his novels arrived in our house in hardback, hot off the press. He also greatly admired Amis’s friend Philip Larkin, another product of the suburbs. In my memory, the two of them are the lares and penates of dad’s literary canon—perhaps Gilbert & George would be more accurate.

Our homes, so familiar and confined, do, in fact, contain the world, as Bill Bryson demonstrates in “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” (Random House Audio, 16½ hours). Starting with the mid-19th-century former rectory (nhà của linh mục) in which he lives, he introduces us to a universe of fact, anecdote, history and whimsy (kỳ dị, đồng bóng) spun out of the lares and penates around him. The genial-voiced Bryson reads the book himself, sharing his pleasure in peculiar details — Henry Ford owned a concrete piano; the Duke of Marlborough was a cheapskate who wouldn’t “dot his ‘i’s’ . . . to save on ink”; Cornelius Vanderbilt’s wife went to a costume party as an electric light. The book — an attempt to “write a history of the world without leaving home”— is an intoxicating jumble (mớ lộn xộn): witty, informative and all over the map.

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