Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, the fixed centre of both the household and the city, and though she is one of the twelve Olympians she almost never appears in myth. That absence is the point: she is stability itself, the fire that does not wander. Eldest child of Cronus and Rhea, she swore to remain a virgin and was honoured with the first and the last portion of every sacrifice, so that worship of any god began and ended with her. Her name is her element, hestia is the Greek word for hearth, and the fire on the domestic hearth and on the common hearth of the state were both hers.
Hestia is almost never given a distinct personal image in surviving Greek art; unlike Zeus's thunderbolt or Poseidon's trident, she has no attribute of her own beyond the flame itself, and when she does appear, in a handful of Classical vase paintings and reliefs, she is shown simply as a modestly veiled, seated woman, visually almost interchangeable with any respectable matron, a fitting image for a goddess whose whole character is self-effacement rather than display. Her altar at Olympia, where a sacred fire burned continuously as at other Greek hearths, stood among the sanctuary's oldest structures, tying the goddess of the fixed hearth to the site of the ancient Olympic Games themselves.