Massive thanks to Luke for his help with Ancient Greek Attic pronunciation.
   / @polymathy_luke  
In ancient Roman religion, the sacred flame of Vesta was a sacred eternal flame that was kept burning in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum. The flame was guarded by the Vestal Virgins, who were priestesses of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, home, and family.

But let's rewind back further in time. In search for the origins of the myth.
The Sky Origin of Fire
The sacral aspect of fire, or rather fire as a deified element, has its roots in the ancestral history of mankind. While Dumézil has proposed an Indo-European origin of the cultic nature of fire, starting from the Vedic deity Agni, who represents the protective and purifying fire, which burns demons and acts as an intermediary between man and the gods with its flame rising upwards to the sky with the smoke it generates, the deification of fire is actually present more or less incisively in all cultures of the ancient world.

Fire as an element of celestial and divine origin, foreshadowed by the myth of Prometheus, connects itself to the sky with its origin initially linked to lightning. By learning to master fire, man manages a divine power, a potentially destructive entity that at the same time protects him from ferocious beasts, warms him, and illuminates the darkness. All these characteristics lead the fire of myth to shape itself around its protective and defensive elements, at the expense of the destructive ones. In the minds of the ancients a choise was made.
Hestia
The Greek deity to whom the flame was consecrated is Hestia, whose very name directly recalls the domestic hearth. Theoretically, the hearth of every private home was sacred to Hestia and was her manifestation, but every Greek polis or cityalso had a public place, called Prytaneion, which was consecrated to Hestia and preserved her sacred fire, which was never to be extinguished and represented the spirit of the city. Originally, the Prytaneion was supposed to be a sort of royal residence, the seat of the Prytanis, a position of pre-Indo-European origin, comparable to an absolute monarch.

The etymology of Prytanis and Prytaneion, which have their roots in the Aegean and Anatolian world prior to the arrival of Indo-European elements, recall a very archaic position and institution. In fact, the domestic hearth of the one who managed and commanded what, even before being a city, must have been a chiefdom, becomes identifying with the entire community, and its fortunes are linked to it. With the decline of the figure of the absolute monarch, in archaic Athens the figure of the Archon, representing not so much religious but political powers, is linked to the Prytaneion and the cult of Hestia, and from Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Aristotle we learn that the sacrifices in honor of Hestia were performed not by priests but by magistrates with political and executive power. So in a way similarly to how for instance Oblivion connects the ruler to the sacred flame.

The Prytaneion, to which over time a second circular building called Tholos is associated, ends up acquiring further representative functions in classical Greece, and in addition to being the meeting place of the most powerful magistrates and the place where the city's fire is kept, it is where foreign ambassadors are welcomed and where the most deserving citizens are hosted for some time at the state's expense.

As proof of the political and civic function of Hestia's fire, part of the fire that the colonists took with them on the eve of the founding of a new city was taken from the Prytaneion, to symbolize the origin and common civic bond (cf. William Lethaby, "Architecture. Mysticism and Myth"), and it is evidently the fire of Hestia from the Prytaneion of Troy that Aeneas carries with him, according to the Virgilian myth, when he flees from the burning of the city.

Vesta
"For a long time I foolishly believed that there were statues of Vesta, but then I learned that under the curved dome there are no statues at all. An ever-living fire is hidden in that temple, and Vesta has no effigy, just as fire has none."
Ovid writes in the Fasti:
The figure of Hestia is closely connected to the Latin deity Vesta, and it is no coincidence that Vesta has the epithet "Iliaca" for Ovid, meaning "of Ilium," "of Troy," thus linked to the sacred fire of the goddess-hearth, Hestia, of Troy, which Aeneas brings with him to Latium.

#ancientrome #mythology #ancientgreece