service
was attributed to Numa Pompilius. The first building, as Ovid tells
us, was constructed with wattled walls and a thatched roof like the
primitive huts of the inhabitants. It was little more than a covered
fireplace. It was the public hearth of the new city, round which were
gathered all the private ones. On it burned continually the sacred
fire, the symbol of the life of the state, which was believed to have
been brought from Troy, and the continuance of which was connected by
superstition with the fortunes of Rome. In the secret penetralia of
the temple, where no man was allowed to enter, was kept with
scrupulous care, for its preservation was equally bound up with the
safety of the empire, the Palladium, or image of Pallas, saved from
the destruction of Troy, and which was supposed to have originally
fallen from heaven. The circular form and the domed roof of the temple
were survivals of the prehistoric huts of the Aborigines, which were
invariably round, as the traces of their foundations show. With the
exception of the Palladium, which remained invisible during all the
ages to ordinary mortal eyes until the destructive fire in the Forum,
in the reign of Commodus, compelled the Vestal Virgins to expose it in
removing it for safety to the imperial court, there was in primitive
times no statue or material representation of the goddess except the
sacred fire in the mysterious shrine of the temple. Indeed the Romans,
as Plutarch tells us, raised no statue to the gods until the year of
Rome 170. In this respect the religion of the Romans, whose divinities
had no participation in the life and passions of men, and had nothing
to do with the human form, differed widely from the religion of the
Greeks, which, inspired by the sentiment of the beautiful in man and
nature, gave birth to art.

The Temple of Vesta, as might have been expected, shared in all the
wonderful changes of Roman history. It was abandoned when the Gauls
entered Rome, and the Vestal Virgins took the sacred fire and the
Palladium to Caere in Etruria for safety. It was destroyed two hundred
and forty-one years before Christ, when L. Metellus, the Pontifex
Maximus at the time, saved the Palladium with the loss of his
eyesight, and consequently of his priesthood, for which a statue was
erected to him in the Capitol. It was consumed in the great fire of
Nero, and rebuilt by Vespasian, on some of whose coins it is
represented. It was finally burnt down i