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In the temple — which contained no statue of the goddess — the Vestal virgins tended the sacred fire which was renewed every first of March, the new-year's day of the oldest Roman year (the year of Numa). Besides the hearth the temple contained a holy of holies, the penus Vestae, a space, possibly merely a niche in the wall, screened off by tapestries. Here were kept certain mysterious symbols and pledges of the power of Rome, especially the palladium, which Aeneas was thought to have rescued are the burning city of Troy. Men, with the exception of the pontifex maximus, were never allowed to enter the temple, and women were admitted only during the festival of the Vestalia (June 7‑15). The temple was several times destroyed by fire, for example in B.C. 410 and 241. At that time its fashion of construction — plaited reeds and a straw roof, in imitation of the ancient round hut of the Roman peasant — must have afforded bountiful food for the flames. But even in the time of the empire, when it was built entirely of stone and metal, it suffered severely, for example in the great fire in the p186reign of Commodus (A.D. 191). Septimius Severus and his wife Julia Domna restored the building, and it is from this restoration that most of the architectural fragments come. In A.D. 394 Theodosius closed the temple: in the VIII.-IX. centuries it must have been in ruins, for many pieces of it were found built into the mediaeval wall between the Lacus Juturnae and the temple of Castor. In the time of the Renaissance the knowledge of the site of the temple was so entirely lost that some scholars called the church of S. Teodoro at the foot of the Palatine the temple of Vesta, while others identified the temple with the little round temple near the Ponte Rotto. Not until the recent excavations (1872, 184, 1901) were the site and the manner of construction clearly known.
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