Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/42

 36 ANCIENT BELIEFS. BOOK I. first sacrifice that assembled Greece offered was to the hearth-tire, the second was to Zeus.' So, too, at Rome, the first adoration was always addressed to Vesta, who was no other than the hearth-fire. Ovid says of this goddess, that she occupied the first place in the religious practices of men. We also read in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, " Agni must be invoked before all the other gods. We pronounce liis venerable name before that of all the other immortals. O Agni, whatever other god we honor with our sacrifices, the holocaust is always offered to thee." " It is certain, therefore, that at Rome in Ovid's time, and in India in the time of the Brahmins, the fire of the heai'th took precedence «ef all other gods ; not that Jupiter and Brahma had not acquired a greater importance in the religion of men, but it was remembered that the hearth-fire was much older than those gods. For many centuries he had held the first place in the religious worship, and the newer and greater gods could not dispossess hira of this place. The symbols of this religion became modified in the course of ages. When the people of Greece and Italy began to represent their gods as jiersons, and to give each one a proper name and a human form, the old worship of the hearth-fire submitted to the common law which human intelligence, in that period, imposed upon every religion. The altar of the sacred fire was personified. They called it haila, Vesta; the name was the same in Latin and in Greek, and was the same Hesychius, aip' ioTtai. Diodorus, VI. 2. Aristoph., Birds, 665. ' Pausanias, V. 14. » Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, II. 27. Ovid, Fast., VI. 304.