Hestia (Roman Vesta) presided over the private hearths and homesteads of the Greeks, and imparted to them a sacred character.  Her personality was vague, but she represented the purity which among both Greeks and Romans is attached to home and domestic life.

Demeter (Roman Ceres) represented Mother Earth, and thus was closely associated with agriculture and all operations of tillage and bread-making.  As agriculture is the primitive and most important of all human vocations, this deity presided over civilization and law-giving, and occupied an important position in the Eleusinian mysteries.

These were the twelve Olympian divinities, or greater gods; but they represent only a small part of the Grecian Pantheon.  There was Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), the god of drunkenness.  This deity presided over vineyards, and his worship was attended with disgraceful orgies,—­with wild dances, noisy revels, exciting music, and frenzied demonstrations.

Leto (Roman Latona), another wife of Zeus, and mother of Apollo and Diana, was a very different personage from Hera, being the impersonation of all those womanly qualities which are valued in woman,—­silent, unobtrusive, condescending, chaste, kindly, ready to help and tend, and subordinating herself to her children.

Persephone (Roman Proserpina) was the queen of the dead, ruling the infernal realm even more distinctly than her husband Pluto, severely pure as she was awful and terrible; but there were no temples erected to her, as the Greeks did not trouble themselves much about the future state.

The minor deities of the Greeks were innumerable, and were identified with every separate thing which occupied their thoughts,—­with mountains, rivers, capes, towns, fountains, rocks; with domestic animals, with monsters of the deep, with demons and departed heroes, with water-nymphs and wood-nymphs, with the qualities of mind and attributes of the body; with sleep and death, old age and pain, strife and victory; with hunger, grief, ridicule, wisdom, deceit, grace; with night and day, the hours, the thunder the rainbow,—–­in short, all the wonders of Nature, all the affections of the soul, and all the qualities of the mind; everything they saw, everything they talked about, everything they felt.  All these wonders and sentiments they impersonated; and these impersonations were supposed to preside over the things they represented, and to a certain extent were worshipped.  If a man wished the winds to be propitious, he prayed to Zeus; if he wished to be prospered in his bargains, he invoked Hermes; if he wished to be successful in war, he prayed to Ares.