Vestal Virgin

A Vestal Virgin was one of six priestesses who tended the perpetual sacred fire of Vesta in her round temple at the edge of the Roman Forum, a fire whose extinction was regarded as a grave omen for the city itself. Girls were chosen for the office between the ages of six and ten, typically from patrician families in the early Republic though eligibility later widened, and served a fixed term of thirty years: ten as a novice learning the order's duties, ten performing them at full standing, and ten more teaching the next generation of novices before an aging Vestal could, in principle, leave and marry.

Vestals held a legal status unlike that of any other Roman woman, released from the authority of a father or husband that structured the rest of Roman female life, able to own property, make a will, and give testimony in court on their own standing. Their public duties extended well beyond guarding the flame: they fetched water from a sacred spring for ritual use, prepared the salted flour used in state sacrifices, safeguarded the city's most sacred objects including, by tradition, the Palladium said to have been carried from Troy, and their intercession could stay an execution if a condemned prisoner crossed their path.

Robin Lorsch Wildfang's study of the order argues that Vestal virginity carried meaning on several levels at once, a literal chastity requirement, a symbolic marker separating the priestesses from ordinary marriageable women, and a guarantee that the city's sacred fire was tended by women outside the ordinary claims of family and household that structured the rest of Roman religious and civic life.

The penalty for a Vestal found to have broken her vow of chastity, a crime the Romans called incestum, was among the most severe in Roman religious law: she was buried alive in an underground chamber near the city walls, sealed in with a small ration of food and a lamp, a bloodless death intended to preserve the legal fiction that the state itself had not killed a woman whose blood it was forbidden to shed. Accusations of incestum tended to cluster around moments of civic crisis, military defeat or bad omens, when Romans searched for a religious explanation for public misfortune, and several documented cases show the charge functioning as much as a response to political anxiety as to any established fact.

The order's privileges reflected its centrality to Roman religious life: Vestals sat in reserved seats of honor at public games, were preceded in public by a lictor as consuls were, and their tomb, unusually for Rome, could stand within the city walls rather than being required to lie outside them as ordinary burials were. This combination of extraordinary honor and extraordinary risk made the Vestal office one of the very few positions in Roman society that placed a woman at the symbolic center of the state's own survival.

The order ended in 394 CE, when the emperor Theodosius I's broader suppression of pagan cults across the empire reached Rome's oldest priesthood and the sacred fire of Vesta was extinguished for the final time after more than a thousand years of continuous tending, bringing to a close an office nearly as old as the city that had sustained it.