Vesta was an ancient Roman goddess of the domestic and civic hearth whose annual festival — the Vestalia — was celebrated between the 7th and 15th of June.

The Vestalia marked a pause in everyday life as the Romans honoured Vesta and purified her shrine. It was a time to commemorate the benefits the goddess had brought to the city — and to ensure the continued safety and well-being of Rome and her people.

Who Was Vesta?

Vesta was an Italic deity whose cult was popular in Pompeii and Latium before either Romulus or the legendary King Numa introduced her to archaic Rome.

According to Roman mythology, Vesta was the third daughter of the god Saturnus. Unlike her sisters Juno and Ceres, she did not marry but remained a virgin. She signified the life force of the earth; its ‘vital force’ from which she took her name and which her sacred flame represented.

The Domestic Cult of Vesta

Along with the Penates, Vesta was one of the guardians of the home. Such was Vesta’s domestic importance that, according to the poet Ovid she leant her name to the vestibule or entrance of the Roman house.  By Ovid’s time, the vestibule was a hinterland between the domus’s front door and the atrium. But originally, the vestibule was much more important. It was “at the front of the house” — and the location of the domestic hearth fire.

This hearth fire was the centre of all domestic activity, being the primary source of heat and light for the household — and the Roman’s believed Vesta was its guardian. Eventually, the hub of domestic activity  — and the heath fire — shifted to the atrium. Again, by Ovid’s time, the atrium functioned as a public reception room for visitors. However, initially, it was the place where the family cooked, worked and socialised. Even when these functions moved elsewhere in the Roman house, it remained traditional to leave an offering to Vesta on a special plate on a low altar in the atrium.

Vesta later became associated with the Greek goddess Hestia.  Hestia was also a goddess of the hearth. But Vesta was more than just a domestic goddess. She was one of the twelve Di Consentes — the state gods whose statues stood in the forum. Vesta was also the guardian of the ‘vital force‘ of Rome, its undying flame. This made Vesta the protector of the Roman state.

The Public Cult of Vesta

This sacred flame had — from the earliest times — burnt in the heart of the city of Rome, in the shrine of Vesta which occupied the southeast corner of the Forum Romanum. The shrine was not a temple as it was unconsecrated but instead an Aedes Sacra or sacred building.

Originally a thatched hut with ‘walls woven from pliant wicker,’ Vesta’s shrine was re-built several times, until its last incarnation in the late republic by which time the Romans replaced the straw with ‘roofs of bronze.’ The shrine was then relocated to the Palatine Hill by the emperor Augustus.

But one constant was the shape. The shrine of Vesta was always a circular building — according to Ovid, to emulate the earth. There was no statue of Vesta in her sanctuary, but in its inner sanctum, along with the sacred flame were particular archaic sacred objects.

One was the palladium, the ‘pledge of Rome’s fate’which, according to legend, Aeneas had rescued from Troy. The second was the fascinum, an erect phallus that averted evil.

Rome’s only female priesthood — the Vestal Virgins — guarded and protected the sacred flame and sacred objects until the abandonment of the shrine in 394 AD when Vesta’s rites — along with other pre-Christian religions — were banned by Theodosius I.  

The Time of the Vestalia

Romans observed the Vestalia between the 7th and 15th day of June. During this period, the Romans honoured Vesta as the guardian of Rome with ceremonies and processions before purifying her shrine on the last day of the festival.

Followers considered the period of the Vestalia as nefastus  or ‘unlucky.’ They conducted no public business and celebrated no marriages until the festival was over and ‘fiery Vesta gleams with a clean floor,’ as Ovid describes the act of purification.

From the 7th June onwards, women were allowed to enter the inner sanctum of Vesta to make offerings to her. It was customary to approach the shrine barefoot — not as a sign of humility but in remembrance of the time when the forum area was a marsh that ‘none would approach in shoes.‘

Offerings and Processions on 9th June

9th June was a day of holiday and celebration. For one of only three times in the year, the vestal virgins would prepare mola salsa, a sacred bread used as an offering to their goddess. They made mola from spelt, gathered on specific days in May, and mixed with salt and water from the sacred spring of Juturna near to Vesta’s shrine. The vessels containing this water were not allowed to touch the ground, to preserve the sanctity of the liquid.

This bread was then taken to Vesta’s innermost shrine and offered to the goddess along with oil and wine. They formed an offering of thanksgiving, commemorating the time of Rome’s siege by the Gauls in 390 BC when Vesta saved the city by making the city’s ‘dwindling corn appear plentiful.’

In the city itself, the day was a holiday — at least for Rome’s millers and bakers. Donkeys garlanded with violets and loaves of bread headed the processions in honour of the goddess, while ‘chains of flowers’ adorned their abandoned mill wheels.

According to Ovid, bakers had the day off because, in the early days of Rome, bread was baked — not in ovens — but the sacred ashes of the hearth — Vesta’s domain, ‘hence the baker respects the hearth and the hearth’s mistress.’ The donkey was a favourite animal of Vesta’s. According to legend, a donkey’s braying saved her from ravishment by the god Priapus. For this reason, Romans honoured the beast at her festival.

The Purification of Vesta’s Shrine – and Rome

On the final day of the Vestalia, the shrine of the goddess was ritually swept out and cleansed. The resulting ‘scourings‘ were carefully collected and deposited in the River Tiber so they would be carried away from the city and out to sea.

This cleansing at one time no doubt served a practical purpose, but it was also symbolic; a spiritual cleansing of the city, with the resulting impurities, removed and neutralised by a fast flowing body of water.

Vesta, as Rome’s guardian, had been honoured and the purity of the city’s sacred flame ensured. Normal life in Rome could now resume.

Sources

Ovid, Fasti, Penguin Classics

Georges Dumezil, (trans. Philip Krapp) Archaic Roman Religion, Vols I and II. The John Hopkins University Press