Cult of Gods

Vesta

Roman tradition. See the whole pantheon.

Domains
the hearth, the state fire
Symbols and attributes
Sacred fire; Vestal Virgins
Parents (per the sources used)
Saturn and Ops
Giacomo Caneva, photograph of a statue of Jupiter in the Campana collection, 1850s.
Giacomo Caneva, photograph of a statue of Jupiter in the Campana collection, 1850s.

Key myth

The Vestal Virgins kept her fire burning in the Forum for about a thousand years. Ovid tells that Vesta is the fire and not a statue.

Greek counterpart: Hestia on thegreekgods.org. Roman and Greek versions share names and stories in many places but began as different cults.

Primary sources

  • Ovid, Fasti VI

All sources for the Roman pantheon

Lineage in the sources used: Saturn, Ops.

Place in the family graph

Choose a deity to see where it comes from. Dashed lines are links the sources describe that are not parent and child.

SaturnOpsJanusJupiterJunoNeptunePluto / Dis PaterCeresVestaQuirinusMinervaApolloDianaMercuryBacchus / LiberMarsVulcanVenus

More traditions

Odin rides to Hel, W. G. Collingwood, after the Poetic Edda.NorsePapyrus of Ani, British Museum (New Kingdom), a Book of the Dead.EgyptianA chaos monster and a sun god, drawn by L. Gruner for A. H. Layard's Monuments of Nineveh.MesopotamianVishvarupa Vishnu, Kashmir or Himachal, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection.Hindu

Elsewhere in the world

Deities in other traditions who share a theme with Vesta: earth, harvest and fertility. This is overlap in one area only.

Norse

Sif

golden hair, grain (by later reading)

Norse

Freyr

peace, fertility, sunshine

Egyptian

Geb

earth

Egyptian

Osiris

afterlife, resurrection, fertility of the flood

Egyptian

Sobek

Nile, fertility, kingship

Mesopotamian

Ninlil

grain, wind (as Enlil's wife)

Compare across cultures