The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s5.9

v2.c41.s5.9

The rules in India which urge the householder to maintain a sacred fire, a duty especially incumbent on the king, is paralleled by the Greek evidence as to the fires of the Prytaneia and the Roman cult of Vesta, which bears adequate evidence of independence to render derivation from Greece unnatural. The fire of the Sabhā clearly approaches the conception of these public fires in Greece and Rome. For the practice in Greece and Rome various explanations have been offered. That of Frazer ⁷ stresses the importance of preserving one fire at least in a village which would never be extinguished, while Farnell ⁸ contends that the rite was religious in origin, depending on the belief that the fire on the hearth was the external thing in which the soul of the chief resided, so that the whole tribe had an interest in keeping it up; when kingship passed away the idea was transferred to the fire of the state in the Prytaneion, with which the fortune of the state might be held to be inextricably connected. It may be granted that the purpose of maintaining the fire was religious from the start, but the motive had, it seems probable, nothing to do with any idea of the connexion of the chief’s soul with the fire; rather the fire as a most important¹ and ever valuable deity was to be preserved alight if possible by every sacrificer, an idea which naturally enough with civic organization results in the fires of the Prytaneia and the cult of Vesta at Rome.