and faced with this prospect Azˇi prudently withdraws. The story is set in a
framework of Zoroastrian theology, but it is evidently a version of the old
myth in which the many-headed enemy of the storm-god was overcome with
the help of fire.
Chief among the Scythian gods, according to Herodotus (4. 59, 127. 4), was
Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, called in the Scythian language Tabiti. It is
a natural conjecture that this contains the Indo-European root tep‘be hot,
burn’.^94 Our Greek source perhaps gives us the name in a slightly distorted
guise, but it might represent a feminine participial form corresponding to an
Indo-Iranian Tapatı ̄ ́, ‘the Burning one’.
In view of the difference of gender we cannot say that this Scythian goddess
is just Agni or A ̄tar under another name. But she must have had some of their
most important functions. In Greece and Italy we again find the sacral or
domestic hearth under the tutelage of a female deity, Hestia or Vesta; and
these names too, as we saw in Chapter 3, may originally have meant ‘Burning’.
In cult terms they are the Greek and Roman counterparts of Agni. According
to Ovid (Fasti 6. 291) the living flame was itself Vesta. Her shrine in the
Forum, with its perpetual fire, was the civic hearth of Rome and its oldest
temple. Its distinctive circular form recalls the use of round altars for the
domesticfire in the Agni cult.^95 If the fire ever went out, a new flame had to
be kindled by the same ancient ritual method as was employed in India for
the regeneration of Agni, drilling with wood in wood.^96
Both Greeks and Romans also had a male god of fire, though he appears
somewhat marginalized. The Greek Hephaestus (a son of Zeus, as Agni is
of Dyaus) has in the epic and mythological tradition the specialized role of
divine smith and artificer. He has clearly been to some extent assimilated to
the Canaanite smith-god.^97 On the other hand kφαιστο can also mean fire,
especially the fire over which the flesh of sacrificial victims is cooked or in
which a body is cremated, as in Il. 2. 426, ‘they spitted the innards and held
them over (the) kφαιστο’; cf. 9. 468 = 23. 33 ‘in the flame of Hephaestus’,
Od. 24. 71. In the battle of the gods in Iliad 21 Hephaestus creates a conflagra-
tion to counter the river Scamander, burning trees and vegetation and making
the water boil (330–82; cf. Hymn. Herm. 115). The etymology of his name
is obscure. From its bulk it looks like a compound, and this would point to
a periphrastic title that replaced an original proper name. It may perhaps
(^94) Schrader (1909), 35.
(^95) G. Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, i (Chicago 1970), 313–17; A. Della Volpe, JIES 18
(1990), 166–70, who argues that it symbolized the sun; J. P. Mallory in EIEC 203.
(^96) On the technique and its Indo-European status see Kuhn (1859), 36–47. He notes the use
of oak wood attested for this purpose in Greek, Roman, and Germanic sources.
(^97) Cf. West (1997), 57, 384, 388 f.
- Storm and Stream 267