These must be the so-called Vestal virgins, who were the priestesses of Vesta and had one absolutely central job,

which is tending the sacred flame of the city.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor.

For the whole of human history, believing and belonging have gone together.

In this series of podcasts, I'm looking at objects and at places to see how those shared beliefs have helped build communities and how they can also divide them.

The series is called Living with the Gods,

and it's about faith and about society, but it's essentially about how we live with each other.

In this episode, the focus is on fire.

This is the BBC.

Look at people's faces when they gather around a bonfire

or shrink back from a burning building.

And you'll see how close most of us still are

to the fascination and to the fear

that fire held for our ancestors

when they first gained control of it

more than a million years ago.

It's fire that made human society possible. It kept the wild animals at bay, allowed us to cook,

gave us light and warmth, kept us safe. The hearth is the home. But this flickering, ungraspable fire also has the power to destroy us and our world like nothing else.

No wonder then that this mesmerizing phenomenon was for many societies the obvious symbol of the divine.

Prometheus in classical mythology stole fire from the gods themselves.

For the Jews, God spoke to Moses from the flames of the burning bush. But two great

empires went further. For them, sacred fire came to represent the state itself, to be the

...