ular fact we know about her cult is that
women used to speak of their Juno as men spoke of their Genius;[283] and
it is not by any means impossible that this may be the clue to the
original Italian conception of her.[284] In that case we should have to
explain her appearance as a well-defined goddess in so many Latin towns,
as the anthropomorphising result of that penetration of Greek ideas
into Latium from the south, of which I shall have something to say later
on. Such ideas, when they reached Rome, may have produced the notion
that she was the consort of Jupiter, for which I must confess that I can
find no sufficient evidence in the early cult of either.[285] But I must
here leave her, for in truth she does not belong to this lecture; and it
would need at least one whole lecture to discuss her adequately in all
her later aspects. The latest German discussion of her occupied sixty
closely printed pages; and instructive as it was in some ways, arrived
at the apparently impossible conclusion that she was a deity of the
earth.

Last in the order of invocation, even to the latest days of Rome, came
Vesta, "the only female deity among the highest gods of the most ancient
State,"[286] for Juno can hardly be reckoned among them, and Tellus had
no special cult or priesthood of her own. We have already noticed Vesta
as the religious centre of the house, making it into a _home_ in a sense
almost more vivid than that in which we use the sacred word. Through all
stages of development from house to city this religious centre must have
been preserved, and in the Rome of historical times Vesta was still
there, inherent in her sacred hearth-fire, which was tended by her six
virgin priestesses, and renewed on the Roman New Year's day (March 1) by
the primitive method of friction.[287] The Vestals beyond doubt
represented the unmarried daughters of the primitive Latin family, and
the _penus Vestae_, a kind of Holy of Holies of the Roman State,
recalled the _penus_ or store-closet of the agricultural home; this
_penus_ was cleansed on June 15 for the reception of the first fruits of
the harvest, and then closed until June 7 of the following year.[288]
These and other simple duties of the Vestals, all of them traceable to
the old life on the farm, together with their own sex and maidenhood,
preserved this beautiful cult throughout Roman history from all
contamination. Vesta in her _aedes_, a round dwelling which was never a
temple in the