of the landgrave of Hesse, by whom he was summoned in 1536 as professor of poetry and history to Marburg, where he died on the 5th of October 1540. Hessus, who was considered the foremost Latin poet of his age, was a facile verse-maker, but not a true poet. He wrote what he thought was likely to pay or secure him the favour of some important person. He wrote local, historical and military poems, idylls, epigrams and occasional pieces, collected under the title of Sylvae. His most popular works were translations of the Psalms into Latin distichs (which reached forty editions) and of the Iliad into hexameters. His most original poem was the Heroïdes in imitation of Ovid, consisting of letters from holy women, from the Virgin Mary down to Kunigunde, wife of the emperor Henry II.
His Epistolae were edited by his friend Camerarius, who also wrote his life (1553). There are later accounts of him by M. Hertz (1860), G. Schwertzell (1874) and C. Krause (1879); see also D. F. Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten (Eng. trans., 1874). His poems on Nuremberg and other towns have been edited with commentaries and 16th-century illustrations by J. Neff and V. von Loga in M. Herrmann and S. Szamatolski’s Lateinische Literaturdenkmäler des XV. u. XVI. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1896).
HESTIA, in Greek mythology, the “fire-goddess,” daughter
of Cronus and Rhea, the goddess of hearth and home. She is
not mentioned in Homer, although the hearth is recognized as
a place of refuge for suppliants; this seems to show that her
worship was not universally acknowledged at the time of the
Homeric poems. In post-Homeric religion she is one of the
twelve Olympian deities, but, as the abiding goddess of the
household, she never leaves Olympus. When Apollo and
Poseidon became suitors for her hand, she swore to remain a
maiden for ever; whereupon Zeus bestowed upon her the
honour of presiding over all sacrifices. To her the opening
sacrifice was offered; to her at the sacrificial meal the first and
last libations were poured. The fire of Hestia was always kept
burning, and, if by any accident it became extinct, only sacred
fire produced by friction, or by burning glasses drawing fire from
the sun, might be used to rekindle it. Hestia is the goddess of
the family union, the personification of the idea of home; and as
the city union is only the family union on a large scale, she was
regarded as the goddess of the state. In this character her special
sanctuary was in the prytaneum, where the common hearth-fire
round which the magistrates meet is ever burning, and where the
sacred rites that sanctify the concord of city life are performed.
From this fire, as the representative of the life of the city, intending
colonists took the fire which was to be kindled on the hearth
of the new colony. Hestia was closely connected with Zeus, the
god of the family both in its external relation of hospitality and
its internal unity round its own hearth; in the Odyssey a form
of oath is by Zeus, the table and the hearth. Again, Hestia is
often associated with Hermes, the two representing home and
domestic life on the one hand, and business and outdoor life on
the other; or, according to others, the association is local—that
of the god of boundaries with the goddess of the house. In
later philosophy Hestia became the hearth of the universe—the
personification of the earth as the centre of the universe, identified
with Cybele and Demeter. As Hestia had her home in the
prytaneum, special temples dedicated to her are of rare occurrence.
She is seldom represented in works of art, and plays no important
part in legend. It is not certain that any really Greek statues of
Hestia are in existence, although the Giustiniani Vesta in the
Torlonia Museum is usually accepted as such. In this she is
represented standing upright, simply robed, a hood over her
head, the left hand raised and pointing upwards. The Roman
deity corresponding to the Greek Hestia is Vesta (q.v.).
See A. Preuner, Hestia-Vesta (1864), the standard treatise on the subject, and his article in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie; J. G. Frazer, “The Prytaneum,” &c., in Journal of Philology, xiv. (1885); G. Hagemann, De Graecorum prytaneis (1881), with bibliography and notes; Homeric Hymns, xxix., ed. T. W. Allen and E. E. Sikes (1904); Farnell, Cults, the Greek States, v. (1909).
HESYCHASTS (ἡσυχασταί or ἡσυχάζοντες, from ἥσυχος,
quiet, also called ὀμφαλόψυχοι, Umbilicanimi, and sometimes
referred to as Euchites, Massalians or Palamites), a quietistic
sect which arose, during the later period of the Byzantine
empire, among the monks of the Greek church, especially at
Mount Athos, then at the height of its fame and influence under
the reign of Andronicus the younger and the abbacy of Symeon.
Owing to various adventitious circumstances the sect came into
great prominence politically and ecclesiastically for a few years
about the middle of the 14th century. Their opinion and practice
will be best represented in the words of one of their early teachers
(quoted by Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 63): “When thou art
alone in thy cell shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner;
raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy
beard and chin on thy breast; turn thine eyes and thy thought
towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel (ὀμφαλός);
and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first
all will be dark and comfortless; but if thou persevere day and
night, thou wilt feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
discovered the place of the heart than it is involved in a mystic
and ethereal light.” About the year 1337 this hesychasm, which
is obviously related to certain well-known forms of Oriental
mysticism, attracted the attention of the learned and versatile
Barlaam, a Calabrian monk, who at that time held the office of
abbot in the Basilian monastery of St Saviour’s in Constantinople,
and who had visited the fraternities of Mount Athos on a tour of
inspection. Amid much that he disapproved, what he specially
took exception to as heretical and blasphemous was the doctrine
entertained as to the nature of this divine light, the fruition of
which was the supposed reward of hesychastic contemplation.
It was maintained to be the pure and perfect essence of God
Himself, that eternal light which had been manifested to the
disciples on Mount Tabor at the transfiguration. This Barlaam
held to be polytheistic, inasmuch as it postulated two eternal
substances, a visible and an invisible God. On the hesychastic
side the controversy was taken up by Gregory Palamas, afterwards
archbishop of Thessalonica, who laboured to establish
a distinction between eternal οὐσία and eternal ἐνέργεια. In
1341 the dispute came before a synod held at Constantinople
and presided over by the emperor Andronicus; the assembly,
influenced by the veneration in which the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius
were held in the Eastern Church, overawed Barlaam,
who recanted and returned to Calabria, afterwards becoming
bishop of Hierace in the Latin communion. One of his friends,
Gregory Acindynus, continued the controversy, and three other
synods on the subject were held, at the second of which the
Barlaamites gained a brief victory. But in 1351 under the
presidency of the emperor John Cantacuzenus, the uncreated
light of Mount Tabor was established as an article of faith for
the Greeks, who ever since have been ready to recognize it as an
additional ground of separation from the Roman Church. The
contemporary historians Cantacuzenus and Nicephorus Gregoras
deal very copiously with this subject, taking the Hesychast and
Barlaamite sides respectively. It may be mentioned that in the
time of Justinian the word hesychast was applied to monks in
general simply as descriptive of the quiet and contemplative
character of their pursuits.
See article “Hesychasten” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (3rd ed., 1900), where further references are given.
HESYCHIUS, grammarian of Alexandria, probably flourished
in the 5th century A.D. He was probably a pagan; and the
explanations of words from Gregory of Nazianzus and other
Christian writers (glossae sacrae) are interpolations of a later
time. He has left a Greek dictionary, containing a copious
list of peculiar words, forms and phrases, with an explanation
of their meaning, and often with a reference to the author
who used them or to the district of Greece where they were
current. Hence the book is of great value to the student
of the Greek dialects; while in the restoration of the text
of the classical authors generally, and particularly of such
writers as Aeschylus and Theocritus, who used many unusual
words, its value can hardly be exaggerated. The explanations
of many epithets and phrases reveal many important facts
about the religion and social life of the ancients. In a prefatory
letter Hesychius mentions that his lexicon is based on that of
Diogenianus (itself extracted from an earlier work by Pamphilus),
