The Temple of Vesta, as might have been expected, shared in all the wonderful changes of Roman history.  It was abandoned when the Gauls entered Rome, and the Vestal Virgins took the sacred fire and the Palladium to Caere in Etruria for safety.  It was destroyed two hundred and forty-one years before Christ, when L. Metellus, the Pontifex Maximus at the time, saved the Palladium with the loss of his eyesight, and consequently of his priesthood, for which a statue was erected to him in the Capitol.  It was consumed in the great fire of Nero, and rebuilt by Vespasian, on some of whose coins it is represented.  It was finally burnt down in the fire of Commodus, which destroyed at the same time many important buildings in the Forum.  The worship of Vesta was prohibited by Gratianus in the year 382 of our era, and the public maintenance of the Vestal Virgins abandoned, in spite of the protestations of Symmachus and the forlorn hope of the pagan party.  Great as was the reverence paid to the shrine of Vesta, not being a temple in the proper sense of the term, as it was not consecrated by augury, it had not the right of sanctuary.  Mucius Scaevola, the unfortunate Pontifex Maximus, was murdered beside the altar by order of Marius, and his blood sprinkled the image of the goddess; and Piso Licinianus, the adopted son of Galba, after the assassination of that emperor beside the Curtian Lake in the Forum, was dragged out from the innermost shrine of the temple, to which he had fled for refuge, and barbarously massacred at the door.  But it is impossible to dwell upon all the remarkable events with which this haunted shrine of Rome’s earliest and most beautiful worship is associated.  Certainly no greater object of interest has been exhumed among all the antiquities of the Eternal City than the little round mass of shapeless masonry which has been identified beyond all reasonable doubt as the basement of the world-renowned temple, the household hearth of old Rome.

Opposite the Temple of Vesta, at the north-east corner of the Forum, where it ends, is the magnificent facade of the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, the most perfect of all the Roman temples.  There are six splendid Corinthian columns in front and two at the sides, each composed of a single block of green ripple-marked Cipollino marble, about forty-six feet in height and five feet in diameter, with bases and capitals of marble, originally white, but now rusty and discoloured by age; all beautifully proportioned and carved in the finest style of ancient art.  These columns were buried to half their height in medieval times; and houses were built up against and between them, the marks of whose roofs are still visible in indentations near their summits.  These houses were removed, and the ground excavated down to the bases of the columns in the sixteenth century by Palladio, revealing a grand flight of marble steps, twenty-one in number, leading up to the temple from the street.