Vesta
An Italian goddess of the hearth, and more especially of the fire on the hearth, both in
name and in nature akin to the Greek
Hestia (q.v.),
but worshipped by the Italian nations, particularly by the Latins, from ancient times
independently of any connection with Greece. It has been shown that the worship of Vesta had
its origin in the difficulty and the necessity of obtaining fire in primitive times. Hence, as
even in the present time among savage tribes, arose the custom of keeping a fire always alight
somewhere for the use of the community and of carrying fire thence for any new settlement.
This custom was preserved by the conservatism of religion among civilized Greeks and Romans,
after the necessity had ceased to exist, and the State-hearth was preserved in each Latin
State, just as in Greece in the Prytanea; and in like fashion an outgoing settlement carried
its sacred fire from the parent city. It was natural that from these observances the sacred
flame itself should become personified as a goddess (Ovid,
Fast. vi. 291) who presided over the hearth of each house, and in the
State-hearth or sanctuary of Vesta over the whole commonwealth. Vesta was thus intimately
connected with the Penates as deities of the household and of the State (see
Penates); and the fact that the sacred fire was brought
from the parent city made the Romans trace back the origin of the cult to the more ancient
Latin settlements, first to Lanuvium and Alba, and, after the idea of a Trojan origin
prevailed, to Troy itself, whence it was supposed the sacred fire of Vesta as well as the
Penates had come (
Verg. Aen. ii. 296). To this
cause belongs the ancient custom at Rome that praetors, consuls, and dictators, before they
began their functions, sacrificed at Lanuvium, that town having been an ancient religious
centre of the Latins. At Rome, as in other Latin cities, the sacred fire was tended and the
service of Vesta maintained by a body of virgin priestesses, who lived together in a house
(Atrium Vestae) to the southeast of the Forum, and under the northwest side of the Palatine,
abutting on the Via Nova. This house, as rebuilt under Hadrian, was excavated in 1883, and
from its character and the inscriptions (as late as the beginning of the fourth century A.D.)
and sculptures found in it much additional light has been thrown on the Vestal service. See
Jordan,
Das Tempel der Vesta und d. Haus der Vestalinnen (Berlin,
1886); and Lanciani, in his
Ancient Rome, ch. vi.
(Boston,
1888).
It is no doubt right to assume that the Vestals represented the daughters of the chief in
the primitive tribe, who maintained the State-fire in their father's hut. When Vesta was
recognized as a personal deity it became necessary that the priestesses should dwell in a sort
of nunnery, and that the goddess should have a separate temple; but this Aedes Vestae
preserved the shape of the primitive chief's hut, and was a round building (see illustration
under
Roma). The public worship of Vesta was maintained
in this temple: her private worship belonged to every domestic hearth —in the
earliest Roman houses in the
atrium. In her aspect as a benign goddess of
fire Vesta seems to have been akin to or identical with
Stata Mater (q. v.). See Preuner,
Hestia-Vesta
(Tübingen, 1864); Maes,
Vesta e Vestali (Rome,
1883); the discussion by Frazer in the (English)
Journal of Philology,
vol. xiv., and the articles
Lares,
Penates, and
Vestales, in this Dictionary.