HESTIA, a Greek goddess, who is probably the latest in origin of the greater deities. She seems to belong to a particular stage in the advance of civilization, and to embody the religious sanction that confirmed the social system then reached. When we compare her worship with that of Agni, the nearest parallel in the Vedic period, we see that the Greeks made this advance after they had separated from the Aryan conquerors of India. Agni is invoked in the Rig Veda as the brother, friend, and helper of men, as dwelling with them and mediating between them and the gods. But beyond this Hestia is the hearth-fire as the centre of an association, wider or narrower, which meets in common at the hearth. She is not mentioned in Homer; in the Odyssey sometimes one swears by Zeus, the table and the hearth, i.β., by Zeus as the god of the family both in its external relation of hospitality and its internal unity round its own hearth. Hence we have the Zeus ΐστιώναξ, εστιoυχo<s, lφlστa>s. The former of these two ideas is too delicate and fine ever to become more than a mere aspect of Zeus, but the second gradually formed itself into a distinct worship, in which the already existing worship of the fire was merged. The fact that Hestia is not mentioned in Homer shows that her worship was not so universally acknowledged at the time which these poems reveal to us. Perhaps we may see in the connexion of the Latin Jupiter and Vesta at Lavinium a relic of the original connexion of the two; and the fact that the worship of this same goddess under the same name (they are only two forms of the feminine of the passive participle of the root vas, burn) is found in Latium and Greece affords strong evidence of a specially close connexion between the two races. We find therefore ...