雅思阅读材料：古希腊主神介绍(赫斯提亚)_雅思英语阅读

雅思阅读材料：古希腊主神介绍(赫斯提亚)

　　Myths and attributes

　　Hestia is a goddess of the first Olympian generation, along with Demeter and Hera. She was a daughter of the Titans Rhea and Cronus, and sister toZeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera and Hades. Immediately after their birth, Cronus swallowed all but the last and youngest, Zeus, who forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings and led them in a war against their father and the other Titans. As first to be devoured... and the last to be yielded up again, Hestia was thus both the eldest and youngest daughter; this mythic inversion is found in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite . Hestia rejects the marriage suits of Poseidon and Apollo, and swears herself to perpetual virginity. She thus rejects Aphrodites values and becomes, to some extent, her chaste, domestic complementary, or antithesis. Zeus assigns Hestia a duty to feed and maintain the fires of the Olympian hearth with the fatty, combustible portions of animal sacrifices to the gods.

　　Hestias Olympian status is equivocal. At Athens in Platos time, notes Kenneth Dorter there was a discrepancy in the list of the twelve chief gods, as to whether Hestia or Dionysus was included with the other eleven. The altar to them at the agora, for example, included Hestia, but the east frieze of the Parthenon had Dionysus instead. Hestias omission from some lists of the Twelve Olympians is sometimes taken as illustration of her passive, non-confrontational nature by giving her Olympian seat to Dionysus she prevents heavenly conflict but no ancient source or myth describes such a surrender or removal. Since the hearth is immovable, Hestia is unable to take part even in the procession of the gods, let alone the other antics of the Olympians, Burkert remarks. Her mythographic status as first-born of Rhea and Cronus seems to justify the tradition in which a small offering is made to Hestia before any sacrifice .