[Sidenote: Similarity between the fire-customs of the Herero and the ancient Latins.] The reader may remember that the preceding account of the fire-customs of the Herero was introduced for the sake of comparison with the Latin worship of Vesta. The points of similarity between the two will now be indicated. In the first place we have seen reason to hold that the ever-burning Vestal fire at Rome was merely a survival of the fire on the king’s hearth. So among the Herero the sacred fire of the village is the chief’s fire, which is kept burning or smouldering in his house by day and by night. In Rome, as in Hereroland, the extinction of the fire was regarded as an evil omen, which had to be expiated by sacrifices,[737] and new fire was procured in primitive fashion by twirling the point of one stick in the hole of another. The Roman fire was fed with the wood of the sacred oak tree, just as the African fire is kindled with the wood of the sacred _omumborombonga_ tree. Beside both were kept the images of the ancestors, the Lares at Rome, the _ozondume_ in Hereroland. The king’s house which sheltered the fire and the images was originally in Italy what the chief’s hut still is in Hereroland, a circular hut of osiers, not as ancient dreamers thought, because the earth is round,[738] nor yet because a circle is the symbol of rest, but simply because it is both easier and cheaper to build a round hut than a square.[739] [Sidenote: The Roman Vestals, or some of them, appear to have been originally the king’s daughters.] Further, in Rome the sacred fire was tended, as it still is in Hereroland, by unmarried women, and as the Herero priestesses are the chiefs daughters, so, we may conjecture, it was with some at least of the Vestals among the ancient Latins. The Roman Vestals appear to have been under the _patria potestas_ of the king, and, in republican times, of the Pontifex Maximus, who succeeded to some of the king’s functions.[740] But if they were under the _patria potestas_ of the king, they must have been either his wives or daughters; as virgins they cannot have been his wives; it remains, therefore, that they were his daughters. Various circumstances confirm this view. Their house at Rome, as we saw, always adjoined the Regia, the old palace of the kings; they were treated with marks of respect usually accorded to royalty;[741] and the most famous of all the Vestals, the mother of Romulus, was said to be a daughter of the King of Alba.[742] The custom of putting an unfaithful Vestal to death by immuring her in a subterranean chamber[743] may have been adopted in order to avoid the necessity of taking the life of a princess by violence;[744] for, as we shall learn later on, there is a very widespread reluctance to spill royal blood.