Hestia's civic form was the fire kept perpetually burning in the prytaneion, the town hall at the heart of a Greek city, tended so that it never went out. When a city sent out colonists to found a new settlement, they carried embers from this common hearth to kindle the hearth of the daughter city, a rite that made Hestia the literal link between mother-city and colony. In one later tradition she gave up her seat among the twelve Olympians to Dionysus, content to keep the household fire while he took a throne, a story that expresses, in mythic form, her self-effacing and unmoving character. Rome honoured the same power as Vesta, whose sacred flame was tended by the Vestal Virgins.
The modern Olympic flame and torch relay, familiar from every Games since a ceremonial lighting was introduced at Amsterdam in 1928 and the relay itself first run for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, is often popularly traced straight back to Hestia's perpetual hearth fires, and the modern lighting ceremony does take place at the site of her ancient altar at Olympia using a parabolic mirror and sunlight in deliberate imitation of old practice; historians of the Games note, however, that the relay itself is a twentieth-century invention, devised for the 1936 Games rather than a direct survival of any specific ancient Greek rite, so the modern flame is best understood as a modern homage consciously built on Hestia's ancient meaning rather than an unbroken ritual descent from it.