赫斯提亚Hestia
雅思口语素材：古希腊12主神介绍(赫斯提亚)
希腊神话中的女灶神、家宅的保护者。赫西奥德及其以后的作家认为她是克罗诺斯和瑞亚的女儿，赫拉、得墨忒尔等的姊妹，宙斯的姐姐。是早一辈的神，不过并非奥林匹斯12众神之一(据说有一种说法是赫斯提亚是12主神之一，而冥帝哈德斯不是12主神之一)。
In Ancient Greek religion Hestia (Ancient Greek: Ἑστία, "hearth" or "fireside") is the virgin goddess of the hearth, architecture, and the right ordering of domesticity, the family and the state. In Greek mythologyshe is a daughter of Cronus and Rhea.[1]
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. She sat on a plain wooden throne with a white woolen cushion and did not trouble to choose an emblem for herself.[1] Her Roman equivalent is Vesta.
Myths and attributes
Hestia is a goddess of the first Olympian generation, along with Demeter and Hera. She was a daughter of the Titans Rhea and Cronus, and sister toZeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera and Hades. Immediately after their birth, Cronus swallowed all but the last and youngest, Zeus, who forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings and led them in a war against their father and the other Titans. As "first to be devoured... and the last to be yielded up again", Hestia was thus both the eldest and youngest daughter; this mythic inversion is found in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (700 BC). Hestia rejects the marriage suits of Poseidon and Apollo, and swears herself to perpetual virginity. She thus rejects Aphrodite's values and becomes, to some extent, her chaste, domestic complementary, or antithesis. Zeus assigns Hestia a duty to feed and maintain the fires of the Olympian hearth with the fatty, combustible portions of animal sacrifices to the gods.
Hestia's Olympian status is equivocal. At Athens "in Plato's time," notes Kenneth Dorter "there was a discrepancy in the list of the twelve chief gods, as to whether Hestia or Dionysus was included with the other eleven. The altar to them at the agora, for example, included Hestia, but the east frieze of the Parthenon had Dionysus instead." Hestia's omission from some lists of the Twelve Olympians is sometimes taken as illustration of her passive, non-confrontational nature – by giving her Olympian seat to Dionysus she prevents heavenly conflict – but no ancient source or myth describes such a surrender or removal. "Since the hearth is immovable, Hestia is unable to take part even in the procession of the gods, let alone the other antics of the Olympians," Burkert remarks. Her mythographic status as first-born of Rhea and Cronus seems to justify the tradition in which a small offering is made to Hestia before any sacrifice ("Hestia comes first").
The ambiguities in Hestia's mythology are matched by her indeterminate attributes, character and iconography. She is identified with the hearth as a physical object, and the abstractions of community and domesticity, but portrayals of her are rare, and seldom secure. In classical Greek art, she is occasionally depicted as a woman, simply and modestly cloaked in a head veil. She is sometimes shown with a staff in hand.
Homeric hymn 24, To Hestia, is a brief invocation of five lines:
Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo, the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho, with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house, come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise: draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song.
The hymn locates Hestia in ancient Delphi, the central hearth of all the Hellenes, rather than at the hearth of Zeus on Mount Olympus.
