Vestal Virgin
History
Priesthoods with similar functions to the Vestals of Rome had an ancient and deeply embedded religious role in various surrounding Latin communities. According to Livy, the Vestals had pre-Roman origins at Alba Longa, where Rhea Silvia, a virgin daughter of the king, forced by her usurper uncle to become a Vestal, miraculously gave birth to twin boys, Romulus and Remus. The twins were fathered by Mars. They survived their uncle's attempts to kill them through exposure or drowning, and Romulus went on to found Rome. In the most widely accepted versions of Rome's beginnings, the city's legendary second king, Numa Pompilius, built its first Temple of Vesta, appointed its first pair of Vestals, and subsidised them as a collegiate priesthood. He then added a second pair. Rome's sixth king, Servius Tullius, who was also said to have been miraculously fathered by the fire god Vulcan or the household Lar with a captive Vestal, increased the number of Vestals to six. In the Imperial era as attested by Plutarch, the college had six Vestals at any given time. Claims by Ambrose and others that the college comprised seven Vestals in the late 4th century rest on "very unsatisfactory evidence".The Vestals were a powerful and influential priesthood. Towards the end of the Republican era, when Sulla included the young Julius Caesar in his proscriptions, the Vestals interceded on Caesar's behalf and gained him pardon. Caesar's adopted heir Augustus promoted the Vestals' moral reputation and presence at public functions and restored several of their customary privileges that had fallen into abeyance. They were held in awe and attributed certain mysterious and supernatural powers and abilities. Pliny the Elder tacitly accepted these powers as fact:
The 4th-century AD urban prefect Symmachus, who sought to maintain traditional Roman religion during the rise of Christianity, wrote:
Dissolution of the Vestal College would have followed soon after the emperor Gratian confiscated its revenues in 382 AD. The last epigraphically attested Vestal is Coelia Concordia, a Virgo Vestalis Maxima who in 385 AD erected a statue to the deceased pontiff Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. Zosimos claims that when Theodosius I visited Rome in 394 AD, his niece Serena insulted an aged Vestal, said to be the last of her kind. It is unclear from Zosimos's narrative whether Vesta's cult was still functioning, maintained by that single Vestal, or moribund. Cameron is skeptical of the entire tale, noting that Theodosius did not visit Rome in 394.
Term of service
The Vestals were committed to the priesthood before puberty and sworn to celibacy for a minimum period of 30 years. A thirty-year commitment was divided into three decade-long periods during which Vestals were students, servants, and teachers, respectively. Vestals typically retired with a state pension in their late 30s to early 40s and thereafter were free to marry. The pontifex maximus, acting as the father of the bride, might arrange a marriage with a suitable Roman nobleman on behalf of the retired Vestal, but no literary accounts of such marriages have survived. Plutarch repeats a claim that "few have welcomed the indulgence, and that those who did so were not happy, but were a prey to repentance and dejection for the rest of their lives, thereby inspiring the rest with superstitious fears, so that until old age and death they remained steadfast in their virginity". Some Vestals preferred to renew their vows. Occia was vestal for 57 years between 38 BC and 19 AD.Image:RomaCasaVestaliDaPalatinoOvest.JPG|thumb|House of the Vestals and Temple of Vesta from the Palatine
Selection
To obtain entry into the order, a girl had to be free of physical, moral, and mental 'defects'; have two living parents; and be a daughter of a free-born resident of Rome. From at least the mid-Republican era, the pontifex maximus chose Vestals by lot from a group of twenty high-born candidates at a gathering of their families and other Roman citizens.Under the Papian Law of the 3rd century BC, candidates for Vestal priesthoods had to be of patrician birth. Membership was opened to plebeians as it became difficult to find patricians willing to commit their daughters to 30 years as a Vestal, and then ultimately even from the daughters of freemen for the same reason.
The choosing ceremony was known as a captio. Once a girl was chosen to be a Vestal, the pontifex pointed to her and led her away from her parents with the words, "I take you, amata, to be a Vestal priestess, who will carry out sacred rites, which it is the law for a Vestal priestess to perform, on behalf of the Roman people, on the same terms as her who was a Vestal 'on the best terms. As soon as she entered the atrium of Vesta's temple, she was under the goddess' service and protection.
If a Vestal died before her contracted term ended, potential replacements would be presented in the quarters of the chief Vestal to select the most virtuous. Unlike normal inductees, these candidates did not have to be prepubescent, nor even virgins; they could be young widows or even divorcées, though that was frowned upon and thought unlucky. Tacitus recounts how Gaius Fonteius Agrippa and Domitius Pollio offered their daughters as Vestal candidates in 19 AD to fill such a vacant position. Equally matched, Pollio's daughter was chosen only because Agrippa had been recently divorced. The pontifex maximus "consoled" the failed candidate with a dowry of 1 million sesterces.The chief Vestal oversaw the work and morals of the Vestals and was a member of the College of Pontiffs. The chief Vestal was probably the most influential and independent of Rome's high priestesses, committed to maintaining several different cults, maintaining personal connections to her birth family, and cultivating the society of her equals among the Roman elite. The Vestalis Maxima Occia presided over the Vestals for 57 years, according to Tacitus. The Flamen Dialis and the rex sacrorum also held unique responsibility for certain religious rites, but each held office by virtue of their standing as the spouse of a male priest.
File:ReliefVestals.jpg|thumb|Relief of the Vestal Virgins at a banquet, found in 1935 near Rome's Via del Corso
Duties and festivals
Vestal tasks included the maintenance of their chastity, tending Vesta's sacred fire, guarding her sacred Penates and its contents; collecting ritually pure water from a sacred spring; preparing substances used in public rites, presiding at the Vestalia and attending other festivals. Vesta's temple was essentially the temple of all Rome and its citizens; it was open all day; by night it was closed to men. The Vestals regularly swept and cleansed Vesta's shrine, functioning as surrogate housekeepers, in a religious sense, for all of Rome, and maintaining and controlling the connections between Rome's public and private religion. So long as their bodies remained unpenetrated, the walls of Rome would remain intact. Their flesh belonged to Rome, and when they died, whatever the cause of their death, their bodies remained within the city's boundary.The Vestals acknowledged one of their number as senior authority, the Vestalis Maxima, but all were ultimately under the authority of the pontifex maximus, head of his priestly college. His influence and status grew during the Republican era, and the religious post became an important, lifetime adjunct to the political power of the annually elected consulship. When Augustus became pontifex maximus, and thus supervisor of all religion, he donated his house to the Vestals. Their sacred fire became his household fire, and his domestic gods became their responsibility. This arrangement between Vestals and Emperor persisted throughout the Imperial era.
The Vestals guarded various sacred objects kept in Vesta's penus, including the Palladium – a statue of Pallas Athene which had supposedly been brought from Troy – and a large, presumably wooden phallus, used in fertility rites and at least one triumphal procession, perhaps slung beneath the triumphal general's chariot.
Festivals
Vesta's chief festival was the Vestalia, held in her temple from June 7 to June 15, and attended by matrons and bakers. Servius claims that during the Vestalia, the Lupercalia and on September 13, the three youngest Vestals reaped unripened far. The three senior Vestals parched the grain to make it edible, and mixed it with salt, to make the mola salsa used by priests and priestesses to consecrate the animal victims offered in public sacrifices. The Vestals' activities thus provided a shared link to various public, and possibly some private cults.The Fordicidia was a characteristically rustic, agricultural festival, in which a pregnant cow was sacrificed to the Earth-goddess Tellus, and its unborn calf was reduced to ashes by the senior Vestal. The ashes were mixed with various substances, most notably the dried blood of the previous year's October horse, sacrificed to Mars. The mixture was called suffimen. During the Parilia festival, April 21, it was sprinkled on bonfires to purify shepherds and their flocks, and probably to ensure human and animal fertility in the Roman community. On May 1, Vestals officiated at Bona Dea's public-private, women-only rites at her Aventine temple. They were also present, in some capacity, at the Bona Dea's overnight, women-only December festival, hosted by the wife of Rome's senior magistrate; the magistrate himself was supposed to stay elsewhere for the occasion. On May 15, Vestals and pontiffs collected ritual straw figures called Argei from stations along Rome's city boundary and cast them into the Tiber, to purify the city.
Privileges
Vestals were lawfully personae sui iuris – "sovereign over themselves", answerable only to the pontifex maximus. Unlike any other Roman women, they could make a will of their own volition, and dispose of their property without the sanction of a male guardian. They could give their property to women, something forbidden even to men, under Roman law. As they embodied the Roman state, Vestals could give evidence in trials without first taking the customary oath to the State. They had custody of important wills and state documents, which were presumably locked away in the penus. Their person was sacrosanct; anyone who assaulted a Vestal was assaulting an embodiment of Rome and its gods, and could be killed with impunity. As no magistrate held power over the Vestals, the lictors of magistrates who encountered a Vestal had to lower their fasces in deference.The Vestals had unique, exclusive rights to use a carpentum, an enclosed, two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage; some Roman sources remark on its likeness to the chariots used by Roman generals in triumphs. Otherwise, the Vestals seem to have travelled in a one-seat, curtained litter, or possibly on foot. In every case, they were preceded by a lictor, who was empowered to enforce the Vestal's right-of-way; anyone who passed beneath the litter, or otherwise interfered with its passage, could be lawfully killed on the spot.
Vestals could also free or pardon condemned persons en route to execution by touching them, or merely being seen by them, as long as the encounter had not been pre-arranged.
Vestals were permitted to see things forbidden to all other upper-class Roman women; from the time of Augustus on, they had reserved ring-side seating at public games, including gladiator contests, and stage-side seats at theatrical performances.