Vesta

Vesta is the Roman goddess of the hearth. Ovid, the poet of the Roman calendar, gives her the longest treatment we have, in the sixth book of the Fasti. He calls her a daughter of Saturn and Ops, the third of three sisters with Juno and Ceres (Fasti 6.285-286). Of the three, only Vesta refused marriage (Fasti 6.287-288). Ovid adds a second reason for her virginity: she is the living flame, and fire bears no bodies (Fasti 6.291-294).

Her temple in Rome was small, round and old. Ovid says Rome had kept forty Parilia when the goddess was received into her shrine, the work of a peaceful king (Fasti 6.257-260). That king is Numa. The site of her Atrium was once Numa's great house (Fasti 6.263-264). The first building had a thatched roof and walls of woven wicker (Fasti 6.261-262). Ovid gives the temple's round shape an earthly cause. Vesta and the earth are the same, and the earth is a globe (Fasti 6.267-282).

Ovid also tells that no image stood inside. He says he long believed there were statues of Vesta, then learned that nothing sat under the curved dome. An unquenched fire is hidden in the temple, and neither Vesta nor the fire has a likeness (Fasti 6.295-298). The poet stresses that he never saw her, and that no man was meant to (Fasti 6.253-254).

The one story Ovid tells about Vesta herself is comic. Cybele invited the gods to a feast on Mount Ida, and Vesta fell asleep on the grass (Fasti 6.321-332). The garden god Priapus saw her and crept closer, though he claims he thought she was a nymph (Fasti 6.333-336). Silenus had left his donkey by a stream, and it brayed at the wrong moment. The goddess woke, the gods came running, and Priapus ran off (Fasti 6.339-344). Ovid says this is why Roman bakers hang loaves on donkeys at her festival (Fasti 6.311-312; 6.347).

Vesta also stands behind the origin of Rome. King Amulius made his niece Rhea Silvia a Vestal, so that she would have no children (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1.3.11). She bore twins and named Mars as their father, and Amulius imprisoned her (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1.4.2). Ovid sets the scene at a riverbank, where Silvia the Vestal came at dawn to fetch water for the rites (Fasti 3.11-24). When she gave birth, the statues of Vesta were said to cover their eyes, and the altar shook (Fasti 3.45-48). The infants were Romulus and Remus.

Roman writers disagree on who founded the Vestal Virgins order. Livy says Numa chose virgins as priestesses of Vesta, and that the order had begun in Alba (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1.20.3). Plutarch, in the Life of Numa, says the consecration of the Vestals is ascribed to Numa (Life of Numa 9.5). In the Life of Romulus he records that some say Romulus first introduced the sacred fire and its virgin guards (Plutarch, Life of Romulus 22.1).

The Vestals kept the fire and were bound by strict rules. Plutarch says they vowed chastity for thirty years: ten to learn, ten to serve, ten to teach (Life of Numa 10.1). They had privileges. They could make wills and manage property without a guardian, and a criminal they met on the way to execution was spared (Life of Numa 10.3). A Vestal who broke her vow was buried alive near the Colline gate (Life of Numa 10.4-7). If the fire ever went out, Plutarch says, it had to be made new from the rays of the sun with concave mirrors (Life of Numa 9.6-7). Ovid adds that a new fire was lit in the shrine in March (Fasti 3.143-144).

What the Vestals guarded is disputed. Plutarch reports that some hold that they tend only the fire, while others think they also hide sacred objects that no one else may see (Life of Numa 9.8). Ovid says the temple guarded the pledges of Roman fate that Vesta watches over. He does not say who carried the Palladium from Troy: Diomedes, Ulysses and Aeneas are all named (Fasti 6.433-436). When fire broke out in the temple, the pontifex Metellus rushed in and carried the pledges out himself, though no man was supposed to enter (Fasti 6.437-454).

Virgil links Vesta to Troy. In the night of the city's fall, the ghost of Hector commends Troy's Penates to Aeneas and hands him the fillets, Vesta's power and her eternal fire from the inner shrine (Aeneid 2.293-297). This is why Ovid calls Vesta's hearth Trojan (Fasti 3.142; 6.456).

Greek and Roman religion differed in who kept the fire. Plutarch says that in Greece, perpetual fires such as those at Delphi and Athens were tended by widows past marriage, not virgins (Life of Numa 9.5). Cicero says her name comes from the Greek Hestia and that she rules altars and hearths, and that prayers and sacrifices end in her name (De Natura Deorum 2.67).

The cult ended in late antiquity. Zosimus tells that when the noblewoman Serena took a necklace from a statue and wore it, the only remaining Vestal cursed her (Zosimus, New History 5.38). Zosimus does not date the end of the fire. Modern historians place the closing of the temple in the early 390s under Theodosius I, and 394 is the year usually given.

The Roman and Greek hearth goddesses are set side by side in Hestia vs Vesta.