Hestia in Greek Daily Life

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From The Cults of The Greek States by Richard Farnell

...We might at least expect that Hestia,the personal goddess, who presided over the king's hearth and later over the hearth of the city-hall, each being in its turn the central point of the life of the community, would naturally acquire the position of one of the leading divinities of the Greek political world; and again that, as she had her place at the joint-hearth of the 'gens' and at the hearth of each separate family, she would figure as a prominent tutelary divinity of the ritual specially connected with the life and the law of the family and the clan.

It is surprising at first sight to find that this was not the case. When we look closely at the facts, we discern that she plays no clear directing part in the life of the state or the family. A shadowy potency present in the city-hall or council-chamber, she does not inspire counsel or guide the body politic. The prayers of the councillors are proffered to Zeus Boulaios or Athena Boulaia: the Hestia Boulaia of Athens was merely the eori'a of the council-chamber, the hearth which was called her altar, and it is clear from the various records of it that there was no statue to mark the presence of her as a personal divinity: even if she had an altar there, other than the hearth, it was claimed by Zeus. She was remembered very vaguely at the first libation in the usual sacrifice, but the prime object of the libation is commonly some higher deity.

Even the perpetual fires that are recorded do not, as we have seen, belong always to her. It is Apollo, not Hestia, who is the builder of cities and, with Zeus and Athena, their chief protector; and if a late author chooses to state that the Cretan Knossos was built by Hestia, he is probably confusing her with Rhea. Nor can we say that Diodoros was expressing a genuine mythologic dogma of the popular religion when he speaks of Hestia as the discoverer of house building; he is probably led to this statement merely by his impression that the hearth is the essential kernel of the household.

If we look at the ritual of the phratria, the gens, or the household, we find in our records no prominence of Hestia at all. The marriage-ceremonies appear to have almost ignored her: it is only a late rhetorician, like Menander, who recommends that the happy bridegroom should pray to Hestia as well as to Eros and the deities of birth. It is more remarkable that she is not mentioned at all in the various accounts of the Amphidromia, the ritual performed five days after a birth, when those who had assisted at it and were therefore unclean,stripped themselves and ran naked around the household hearth, bearing the child in their hands: this was in the main a purification ceremony, corresponding to our' churching,' but it was also a christening-service, for the name was given to the child in this celebration, and relatives sent it presents of good omen. Yet there is no hint of the recognition of the personal Hestia in this matter, although the ritual seems essentially to belong to her, and, if any personal deity were needed for it, we should have expected to hear of her rather than of that fictitious hero, Amphidromos, who was invented to stand for its patron.

Again, as regards the process of the adoption of children, in which both the household and the members of the phratry were deeply interested, the whole ceremony possessed a marked religious character, but the personal deities that take cognizance of it are Zeus, Phratrios, and Athena Phratria, and there is no mention of Hestia. Our record for Attica, though usually fuller than what we have for any other state, may be here defective; but it is confirmed by the negative evidence of non-Attic archives, such as the ritual-inscription of Kos, prescribing the ceremonies on the occasion of a birth, and the long and valuable Delphic code of the Labyadai-phratry which deals specially with adoption; in neither the one nor the other is the personal Hestia mentioned at all.

In the Attic household the only actual service performed in her honour, apart from the usual first libation, appears to have been a family meal which may have been sacramentally taken round the hearth and regarded as a sacrifice to her; but all that we are definitely told about it is that ‘when the ancients were sacrificing to Hestia, they gave no one a share in the offerings': this may mean that the offering, which may have been an animal, was wholly consumed in the fire, or, more probably, that the household ate it in secret and allowed no outside person to partake: hence 'he is sacrificing to Hestia' became a proverb for a secret business, or an equivalent to our ‘charity begins at home.’

To explain this comparative insignificance of Hestia in ritual-ceremonies where she might be supposed to be chiefly concerned, as well as in the general religion, and to reconcile it with the vague pre-eminence in ritual and in the Prytaneia that is assigned to her on good authority, is the chief problem presented by the Hestia-cult. To solve it we must deal briefly with the question of her origin. In the opinion of Preuner who has devoted a laborious investigation to this cult, Hestia was originally a goddess of fire, her name itself being derived from an Indo-Germanic root 'vas' shine; the element of fire, which was regarded as pure and divine in its own right, added sanctity to the hearth, and the ideas that attached to the hearth came to be the leading factors in the development of the cult-figure, so that Hestia at an early period ceased to be the goddess of fire in general, and became specialized as the goddess of the ritual-fire on hearth and altar: finally, the city-halls, the Ϗoινaί έσία of the states, arose after the identification of Hestia with the family hearth, and when the idea was prevalent of the city as a joint family.

But his theory does not deal with the difficulty set forth above, and his view concerning her original significance does not wholly accord with the facts that must serve as our data for Hestia's character and cult. There is no trait in her that reveals a glimpse of a prehistoric nature-goddess or elemental daimon. We have no right to suppose that she was ever a divinity of the element of fire, for neither in her myth, cults, nor cult-epithets is any trace of such a conception discernible.

Hephaistos is obviously the fire-god, and his legends and worship do not touch Hestia's at a single point. We have, indeed, the two parallel phrases, "HΦaισroς yελậ and 'Eσrία yελậ, indifferently used when a crackling on the hearth suggested that the spirit in the fire was laughing;but obviously it was equally natural for the superstitious to exclaim, 'the fire is laughing' (HΦaισroς yελậ)as 'the hearth is laughing' Eσrία yελậ. Only once are the two divinities associated in an invocation, and this is a doubtful passage of a Euripidean fragment.

If Hestia, then, is not the goddess of fire in general, may we explain her as arising from the sacrificial fire in particular, which burned on altar or hearth? In the Indo-Iranian religion this appears to have been the origin of Agnib, who develops into a great divine power, the central point of Vedic religion, and a corner-stone of Brahman theosophy, but whose personification was never sufficiently anthropomorphic to disguise his ritualistic origin. But when we look closely at the Greek phenomena we are not contented with this explanation of Hestia. The sacrificial fire in itself does not appear to have been regarded as her equivalent; while in one well-known passage Sophocles identifies it with Hephaistos. And when the sacred fire is carried away from hearth or altar for purifying or protective purposes, as the fire from the Delphic temple was brought to purify the Greek temples after the Persian pollution, or as the fire was taken from the altar of Zeus the leader to precede the Spartan king on the march against the enemy, Hestia does not appear to have had any concern with it at all.

The πύρ άθάναrον,the 'deathless' fire which was worshipped at Delphi in its own right, was distinguished from Hestia, though co-ordinated with her in the formula of the Amphictyonic oath. But where the fire was burning on domestic or public hearth or altar, which under the name of ‘έσχάρα’ or ‘βωμός’ was regarded as itself a hearth, Hestia was there, not indeed always or perhaps usually as a personal goddess, but as a divinely immanent power. The primary and aboriginal fact with which our theory should start, but which is ignored or misstated in Preuner's elaborate treatise, is that the hearth and the hearth-spirit or hearth-goddess are called by the same name. We are driven then to assume that Hestia in her origin is nothing more than the holy hearth with its fire, and the records that have come down to us suggest that she was usually little more than this in the historic periods of Hellas.

The Cults of the Greek States. Farnell, Lewis Richard, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1896-1909

Richard Farnell

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