Vesta / Hestia. In Ancient Greek religion, Hestia is the virgin goddess of the hearth, the right ordering of domesticity, the family, the home, and the state. In Greek mythology, she is the daughter and firstborn child of Kronos and Rhea. Hestia received the first offering at every sacrifice in the household. In the public domain, the hearth of the prytaneum functioned as her official sanctuary. With the establishment of a new colony, flame from Hestia's public hearth in the mother city would be carried to the new settlement. Her Roman equivalent is Vesta; Herodotus equates the Scythian Tabiti with her. The Zoroastrian holy fire of the Sasanians in Adhur Gushnasp was also equated with Hestia by Procopius. Hestia's name means hearth, fireplace, altar, stemming from the same root as the English verbal form was. It thus refers to the oikos, the domestic, home, household, house, or family. 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. The Mycenaean great hall, like Homer's hall of Odysseus at Ithaca, had a central hearth. Likewise, the hearth of the later Greek prytaneum was the community and government's ritual and secular focus. Hestia's name and functions show the hearth's importance in the social, religious, and political life of ancient Greece. The hearth was essential for warmth, food preparation, and the completion of sacrificial offerings to deities. She was also offered the first and last libations of wine at feasts. Her own sacrificial animal was a domestic pig. The accidental or negligent extinction of a domestic hearth-fire represented a failure of domestic and religious care for the family; failure to maintain Hestia's public fire in her temple or shrine was a breach of duty to the broad community. A hearth fire might be deliberately, ritually extinguished at need, and its lighting or relighting should be accompanied by rituals of completion, purification and renewal, comparable with the rituals and connotations of an eternal flame and of sanctuary lamps. At the level of the polis, the hearths of Greek colonies and their mother cities were allied and sanctified through Hestia's cult. Hestia's nearest Roman equivalent, Vesta, had similar functions as a divine personification of Rome's public, domestic, and colonial hearths, and bound Romans together within a form of extended family. The similarity of names between Hestia and Vesta is, however, misleading: The relationship hestia-histie-Vesta cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European linguistics; borrowings from a third language must also be involved, according to Walter Burkert. Responsibility for Hestia's domestic cult usually fell to the leading woman of the household, sometimes to a man. Hestia's rites at the hearths of public buildings were usually led by holders of civil office; Dionysius of Halicarnassus testifies that the prytaneum of a Greek state or community was sacred to Hestia, who was served by the most powerful state officials. Evidence of her priesthoods is extremely rare. Most stems from the early Roman Imperial era, when Sparta offers several examples of women with the priestly title Hestia; Chalcis offers one, a daughter of the local elite. Existing civic cults to Hestia probably served as stock for the grafting of Greek ruler-cult to the Roman emperor, the Imperial family and Rome itself. In Athens, a small seating section at the Theatre of Dionysus was reserved for priesthoods of Hestia on the Acropolis, Livia, and Julia, and of Hestia Romaion. A priest at Delos served Hestia the Athenian Demos and Roma. An eminent citizen of Carian Stratoniceia described himself as a priest of Hestia and several other deities, as well as holding several civic offices. Hestia's political and civic functions are further evidenced by her very numerous privately funded dedications at civic sites, and the administrative rather than religious titles used by the lay-officials involved in her civic cults. Pausanias writes that the Eleans sacrifice first to Hestia and then to other gods. Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophistae, writes that in Naucratis the people dine in the Prytaneion on the natal day of Hestia Prytanitis. Every private and public hearth or prytaneum was regarded as a sanctuary of the goddess, and a portion of the sacrifices, to whatever divinity they were offered, belonged to her. A statue of her reportedly existed in the Athenian Prytaneum: Hard by is the Prytaneon. and figures are placed of the goddesses Eirene and Hestia. There was however very few temples dedicated to Hestia.