Hestia

Template:Greek myth (Olympian) In Greek mythology, virginal Hestia (ancient Greek Ἑστία) is the goddess of the hearth, of the right ordering of domesticity and the family, who received the first offering at every sacrifice in the household. In the public domain, the hearth of the prytaneum or town hall functioned as her official sanctuary. With the establishment of a new colony, flame from Hestia's public hearth would be carried to the new settlement.

Name and Characteristics

Unlike the numerous Greek deities whose names and etymologies are relatively obscure (see, for example, Apollo or Aphrodite), the meaning and origin of Hestia's appellation is strikingly straightforward. At the most basic level, her name literally means "hearth": a fitting title for a goddess who represents interiority, community, and family values.

In Mikalson's accessible introduction to Ancient Greek religion, he notes that young Athenian men, upon taking up arms to defend the polis, swore an oath to various deities, including Hestia. Describing this practice, he states that "Hestia is the hearth of the city-state, maintained with a perpetual fire in the Prytaneion, the state's official dining building." This is not a metonym or poetic hyperbole. Over and above any anthropomorphic religious beliefs or mythological references, Hestia was understood to be quite literally be the related hearths of home and state. For this reason, some scholars argue that the representation of Hestia signifies an older stratum of Hellenistic belief, a "pre-animistic" faith in the sacred power of the hearth itself (rather than in a humanized apotheosis of those powers). Further, this theory also suggests that the direct identification between the goddess and the eminently physical hearth-fire was responsible for the failure of any notable mythology to develop around her Olympian incarnation (as discussed below). As evidence of this, one may note that Hestia (as a deity) is entirely absent from the writings of Homer, though "he uses the term hestia ... as a common noun, designating the 'hearth' or the 'fire of the hearth,' but [even so] the word has at times a certain sacred association for him; for he regards the hearth as the natural place for the suppliant and as a thing that might serve as the pledge of an oath."

In contrast to Homer's lacuna with regards to Hestia, Plato's Cratylus offers a fanciful etymology of the goddess's name—one that assumes her preeminence among the pantheon.

Her theological primacy is evident in her being the first deity to whom you sacrifice. It will therefore be of great significance if her name signifies that most basic of philosophical concepts, ουσια, Being itself. Socrates observes that, in one Greek dialect variant, this association is strongly favoured, since the word for ουσια [ousia] is εσσια [essia], which closely resembles Hestia. The message appears to be that Hestia is definitely to be associated with Being and symbolises the primacy of Being.

For the reasons introduced above, the Platonic account was evidently informed far more by religious practice than by mythic accounts.

In general, this dichotomy between the deity's near-absence in the mythic corpus and her prevalence in ancient Greek religious life will be a recurring theme in the following analysis.

Mythic Representations

The Giustiniani Hestia in O. Seyffert, Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, 1894

Of all of the Olympian gods, almost none have as few surviving tales of their divine exploits as Hestia. Indeed, it is for this reason that Barry Powell (rather unkindly) characterizes her as the "most colorless" of the Olympians. Though absent from the writings of Homer, the goddess is attested to in the writings of Apollodorous, Hesiod, Ovid, various playwrights, and the anonymous authors of the Homeric Hymns, albeit in a haphazard manner. From these scattered references, it is possible to assemble a brief biographical sketch.

First and foremost, Hestia is seen as one of the elder Olympians, a sibling of Demeter, Hades, Poseidon, Hera, and Zeus. As the firstborn child in this potent family unit, she was also the first devoured by her villainous father Cronus, who feared being displaced by his offspring. She remain in the monster's belly until the trickery of Rhea (his consort) allowed Zeus to be born, as the Sky God soon formulated a plan to force his pater to expel the other five Olympians. Hestia, the eldest daughter "became their youngest child, since she was the first to be devoured by their father and the last to be yielded up again." This paradoxical inversion is explicitly commented upon in in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (ca. 700 B.C.E.):

"She was the first-born child of wily Cronos — and youngest too."

Immediately following this miraculous rebirth, the members of the new pantheon (including Hestia) rebelled against the older generation of deities in a massive, internecine battle known as the Titanomachy, from which they eventually emerged victorious.

Originally listed as one of the Twelve Olympians, Hestia gave up her seat in favour of new-comer Dionysus to tend to the sacred fire on Mt. Olympus.[citation needed] 

It is also recalled in the hymn that Poseidon, and Apollo of the younger generation, each aspired to court Hestia, but the goddess was unmoved by Aphrodite's works and swore on the head of Zeus to retain her virginity. The Homeric hymns, like all early Greek literature, are concerned to reinforce the supremacy of Zeus, and Hestia's oath taken upon the head of Zeus is an example of surety. <find reference and quotation>

In his account of the Fasti of the Roman year, Ovid twice recounted an anecdote of Priapus's foiled attempt on a sleeping nymph: once he told it of the nymph Lotis and then again, calling it a "very playful little tale", he retold it of Vesta, the Roman equivalent of Hestia. In the anecdote, after a great feast, when the immortals were all either passed out drunk or asleep, Priapus — who had grotesquely large genatalia — spied Lotis/Vesta and was filled with lust for her. He quietly approached the nymph, but the braying of an ass awoke her just in time. She screamed at the sight and Priapus immediately ran away.

Hestia figures in few myths: she did not roam or have any adventures. The Homeric hymn To Hestia is consequently brief, simply an invocation of five lines, a prelude:<weak intro... read the hymn and reintroduce>

Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo, the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho, with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house, come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise: draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song.

This nature is illustrated by her giving up her seat in the Olympian 12 to prevent conflict.^{[citation needed]}

In the hymn, Hestia is located in ancient Delphi (rather than at the hearth of Zeus on Mount Olympus), which was considered the central hearth of all the Hellenes.

Cultic Observances

"Hestia full of Blessings" Egypt, 6th century tapestry in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection

The hearth fire of a Greek or a Roman household was not allowed to go out, unless it was ritually extinguished and ritually renewed, accompanied by impressive rituals of completion, purification and renewal. Compare the rituals and connotations of an eternal flame and of sanctuary lamps.

Mikalson, 135-136 —> Hestia in family religion Ibid, 160 —> Hestia at the family and larger political level (sacred fire)

A measure of the goddess's ancient primacy—"queenly maid...among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses", in the words of the Homeric hymn— is that she was owed the first as well as the last sacrifice at every ceremonial assembly of Hellenes, a pious duty related by the mythographers as the gift of Zeus, as if it had been his to bestow: another mythic inversion if, as is likely, the ritual was too deep-seated and essential for the Olympian reordering to overturn.

The "great hall" of Minoan-Mycenaean culture as well as the type of earliest enclosed site built for worship on the Greek mainland is the megaron: the name of the Goddess who was venerated in the Helladic megara is not recorded, but at the center of each holy site laid bare by archaeologists was normally a hearth.

<ties to sacred fires> At the more developed level of the polis Hestia symbolizes the alliance between the colonies and their mother-cities.

At a very deep level her name means "home and hearth": the household and its inhabitants. "An early form of the temple is the hearth house; the early temples at Dreros and Prinias on Crete are of this type as indeed is the temple of Apollo at Delphi which always had its inner hestia" (Burkert p 61). It will be recalled that among classical Greeks the altar was always in the open air with no roof but the sky, and that the oracle at Delphi was the shrine of the Goddess before it was assumed by Apollo. The Mycenaean great hall, such as the hall of Odysseus at Ithaca was a megaron, with a central hearthfire.

Roman Parallels

In Roman mythology her more civic approximate equivalent was Vesta, who personified the public hearth, and whose cult round the ever-burning hearth bound Romans together in the form of an extended family. The similarity of names, apparently, is misleading: "The relationship hestia-histie – Vesta cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European linguistics; borrowings from a third language must also be involved," Walter Burkert has written (1985, III.3.1 note 2).

References

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• Apollodorus. Gods & Heroes of the Greeks. Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Simpson. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. ISBN 0-87023-205-3.
• Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical. Translated by John Raffan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. ISBN 0631112413.
• Dillon, Matthew. Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece. London; New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0415127750.
• Farnell, Lewis Richard. The Cults of the Greek States (in Five Volumes). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.
• Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ISBN 080184410X.
• Kerenyi, Karl. The Heroes of the Greeks. Thames & Hudson (New Ed edition), 1997. ISBN 050027049X.
• Mikalson, Jon D. Ancient Greek Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. ISBN 0631232222.
• Nilsson, Martin P. Greek Popular Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. Also accessible online at [1].
• Parke, H. W. Festivals of the Athenians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. ISBN 0-8014-1054-1.
• Powell, Barry B. Classical Myth (Second Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. ISBN 0-13-716714-8.
• Price, Simon. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-38867-8.
• Rose, H. J. A Handbook of Greek Mythology. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1959. ISBN 0-525-47041-7.
• Ruck, Carl A.P. and Staples, Daniel. The World of Classical Myth. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1994. ISBN 0-89089-575-9.
• Rutkowski, Bogdan. The Cult Places of the Aegean. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. ISBN 0300029624.
• Sedley, David. "The Etymologies in Plato's Cratylus." The Journal of Hellenic Studies. Vol. 118, (1998). 140-154.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Hestia

• Carlos Parada, "Hestia" - Retrieved June 18, 2007
• Theoi, "Hestia" - Retrieved June 18, 2007
• Homeric hymns To Aphrodite and To Hestia - Retrieved June 18, 2007
• Ovid, Fasti (Vesta) - Retrieved June 18, 2007

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