ABSTRACT
Vesta has often been studied in terms of function: for Dumezil, she is a goddess whose purity protects the city, through the watch the Vestals keep on Rome’s sacra. Baschirotto emphasised the link between the cult of Vesta and the beginnings and survival of Rome, using comparisons with ritual burials and human sacrifices in various cultures. Defining Vesta as the goddess protecting the integrity of a city is highly problematic in the case of Alba, a city which may have never existed as such. One might hypothesise that Augustus would make a good candidate for the introduction of Vesta’s cult in Tibur, following a Roman model. The amount of academic literature on Vesta in public religion is rather impressive. But even a cursory look at the bibliography shows that the main focus of most studies is, obviously, Rome.
