Who is Vesta?
Defining a goddess
According to the grammarian Eugraphius, “it is the custom (mos) of all Romans to have in their entrance-hall (atrium), i.e. in the vestibule, a Vesta — after whom they named the vestibule –, to whom they would make daily sacrifice, and her altar (ara) used to be located there.” (Commentum Terentii, Andria 4.3.11 = 726.) As the mix of present and past tense suggests, Eugraphius is writing after this has ceased to be commonplace or has perhaps fallen out of use entirely — in “Christian times”, as Augustine called them. What he is describing might therefore be derived from books rather than direct experience.
We come closer to a practitioner’s perspective with Servius and his commentaries on Vergil’s poems. Servius was at any rate a pagan, even if it is unclear to what extent he was able to still carry out any rituals. He agrees with Eugraphius insofar as he thinks that the vestibule is sacred (consecratum) to Vesta (Aeneid 2.469; 6.273), but he considers the vestibulum to be the threshold of the house, not the atrium. According to him, “the parts of the house are sacred to specific gods, like the kitchen to the Penates, and the wall which surrounds the house to Jupiter Herceus.” (Aen. 2.469.) But this is at least a little off; all other sources agree that Jupiter Herceus (gr. Herkeîos) has to do with the inside of a house. Take Festus: “Jupiter Herceus used to be worshipped inside the enclosure of each house, and they also used to call him the deus penetralis” (p. 101 Müller), i.e. the interior god. The word penetralis leads us to the gods called the Penates, of whom Macrobius says that “Vesta is clearly of their number, or at least their companion” (Saturnalia 3.4.11). So it seems that Servius’ neat threefold division collapses, and that wherever or whatever the vestibulum is, it is not necessarily the place where Vesta was worshipped, as Eugraphius thought.
So, let us turn to Cicero, who was certainly much more involved in rituals than Servius or Eugraphius, even if he wrote much less about them. According to him, “her power (vis) pertains to altars and hearths (foci), and therefore the last prayer and sacrifice is always in [!] this goddess, because she is the guardian of the innermost things. From this power, the gods Penates are not far removed, whose name derives either from the storeroom (penus) […] or from the fact that they are located in the interior (penitus), which is why they are also called penetrales by the poets.” (De Natura Deorum 2.67f.) Far from a goddess whose image is worshipped in a clearly defined place, then, Vesta shares responsibilities and location at the hearth (not the house entrance) with other, again somewhat vaguely defined gods, and has a share in all altars. This is because, as implied but not spelled out in Cicero, Vesta is, or is related to, the hearth’s fire. Going back to Servius (Aen. 1.292):
(Vergil uses the word) Vesta in the sense of ‘worship’, because no sacrifice is without fire, which is why she like Janus* is invoked in all sacrifices; for Vesta is named after the Greek hestía (‘Hestia’ or ‘hearth’) […] or because she is clothed (vestita) with all manner of things, because she is said to be the earth, and there is no doubt that the earth contains fire, as we are given to understand from the example of Mount Etna and Vulcan**.
(*Janus at the beginning, Vesta at the end.)
(**He was said to have his smithy inside Etna.)
He summarizes this explanation elsewhere by defining Vesta as “the goddess of fire who, as we have said above, is the earth” (Aen. 2.296), thus drawing together what elsewhere are two rivalling theories, that Vesta is either the Earth or Fire (see e.g. Plutarch, Life of Numa 11). Others went even further, like Lactantius Placidus, who says that Hecate “is believed to be the Mother of Gods and Proserpine or Earth or Vesta” (Thebaid 4.456), but such a sweeping explanation verges on unintelligibility.
Perhaps we can still save Eugraphius’ simple account by making a few qualifications. Firstly, Nonius Marcellus tells us that “there are wont to be Vestae, that is altars and hearths, in the first entrances and spaces of houses” (De compendiosa doctrina 1.258). And Porphyry writes (On Cult Statues = Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 3.11, tl. E.H. Gifford, slightly modified):
The ruling faculty of the earthly power is called Hestia, a virginal statue of whom is usually set up on the hearth; but inasmuch as the power is productive, they symbolize her by the form of a woman with prominent breasts.
This duality also resonates with Latin sources, which on the one hand call the goddess “mother Vesta” (Verg. Georg. 1.498; Servius, Georg. 1.163), but on the other, describe her as “the chastest deity” (Serv. Ecl. 8.29).
Ultimately, it seems that the many divergences and inconsistencies surrounding Vesta disappear when we give up the expectation that there ought to be one place, one image, one identity, and see it as peculiar to Vesta that she is at once present in all altars, all flames, so that a fire can even be her image — like the one kept by the Vestal Virgins —while at the same time, she can be captured in the image of a woman, who has altars of her own, be it in the kitchen or the entrance hall or anywhere else. Whether she is, beyond that, the Earth or Fire itself, is a philosophical nicety.
