The Vestals were committed to the priesthood before puberty (when 6–10 years old) 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 , 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. 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 chose Vestals by lot from a group of twenty high-born candidates at a gathering of their families and other Roman citizens. The choosing ceremony was known as a (capture). Once a girl was chosen to be a Vestal, the pointed to her and led her away from her parents with the words, "I take you, (beloved), 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 (thus, with all the entitlements of a Vestal). 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 (
Tiberius) "consoled" the failed candidate with a dowry of 1 million
sesterces. ====== The chief Vestal ( or , "greatest of the Vestals") 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 Occia presided over the Vestals for 57 years, according to
Tacitus. The and the also held unique responsibility for certain religious rites, but each held office by virtue of their standing as the spouse of a male priest. of the Vestal Virgins at a banquet, found in 1935 near Rome's (
Museum of the)
Duties and festivals is the hearth (seen here in the foreground). Vestal tasks included the maintenance of their chastity, tending Vesta's sacred fire, guarding her sacred (store-room) 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 , but all were ultimately under the authority of the , 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 , and thus supervisor of all religion, he donated his house to the Vestals. Their sacred fire became his household fire, and his domestic gods (
Lares and
Penates) became their responsibility. This arrangement between Vestals and Emperor persisted throughout the Imperial era. The Vestals guarded various sacred objects kept in Vesta's , 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 (
spelt wheat, or possibly
emmer wheat). The three senior Vestals parched the grain to make it edible, and mixed it with salt, to make the used by priests and priestesses to consecrate (dedicate to the gods) 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 . 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 depicting the emperor
Caracalla and Vestals before the Temple of Vesta (early 3rd century) Vestals were lawfully – "sovereign over themselves", answerable only to the . 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 . Their person was
sacrosanct; anyone who assaulted a Vestal was (in effect) 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 in deference. The Vestals had unique, exclusive rights to use a , 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.
Prosecutions and punishments If Vesta's fire went out, Rome was no longer protected. Spontaneous extinction of the sacred flame for no apparent reason might be understood as a
prodigy, a warning that the ("peace of the gods") was disrupted by some undetected impropriety, unnatural phenomenon or religious offence. Romans had a duty to report any suspected prodigies to the Senate, who in turn consulted the , the and the to determine whether the matter must be tried or dismissed. Expiation of prodigies usually involved a special sacrifice () and the destruction of the "unnatural" object that had caused divine offence. Extinction of Vesta's sacred fire through Vestal negligence could be expiated by the scourging or beating of the offender, carried out "in the dark and through a curtain to preserve their modesty". The sacred fire could then be relit, using the correct rituals and the purest materials. Loss of chastity, however, represented a broken oath. It was permanent, irreversible; no or expiation could restore it or compensate for its loss. By ancient tradition, she must die, but she must seem to do so willingly, and her
blood could not be spilled. The city could not seem responsible for her death, and burial of the dead was anyway forbidden within the city's ritual boundary, so she was
immured alive in an underground chamber within the city's ritual boundary () in the ("Evil Field") near the
Colline Gate. That Vesta did not intervene to save her former protege was taken as further divine confirmation of guilt. If discovered, the
paramour of a guilty Vestal was publicly beaten to death by the , in the
Forum Boarium or on the
Comitium. Trials for Vestal were "extremely rare"; most took place during military or religious crises. Some Vestals were probably used as scapegoats; their political alliances and alleged failure to observe oaths and duties were held to account for civil disturbances, wars, famines, plagues and other signs of divine displeasure. In 337 BC, Minucia, another possible first
plebeian Vestal, was tried, found guilty of unchastity and buried alive on the strength of her excessive and inappropriate love of dress, and the evidence of a slave. , fragment of a relief found on the
Palatine Hill (British Museum) In 123 BC the gift of an altar, shrine and couch to the Bona Dea's Aventine temple by the Vestal
Licinia "without the people's approval" was refused by the
Roman Senate. In 114 Licinia and two of her colleagues, Vestals
Aemilia and
Marcia, were accused of multiple acts of . The final accusations were justified by the death, in 114 BC, of Helvia, a virgin girl of equestrian family, killed by lightning while on horseback. The manner of her death was interpreted as a
prodigy, proof of
inchastity by the three accused. Aemilia, who had supposedly incited the two others to follow her example, was condemned outright and put to death. Marcia, who was accused of only one offence, and Licinia, who was accused of many, were at first acquitted by the
pontifices, but were retried by
Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla (consul 127), and condemned to death in 113. The prosecution offered two
Sibylline prophecies in support of the final verdicts. Of the three Vestals executed for between the
first Punic War (216) and the end of the Republic (113–111), each was followed by a nameless, bloodless form of human sacrifice seemingly reserved for times of extreme crisis, supposedly at the recommendation of the
Sibylline Books; the living burial or immurement in the of a Greek man and woman, and a
Gaulish man and woman, possibly to avert divine outrage at the ritual killing of the Vestal priestesses involved. According to Erdkamp, this may have also been intended to restore divine support for Rome's success on the battlefield, evidenced by later successful auguries. The initial charges against the Vestals concerned were almost certainly trumped up, and may have been politically motivated. Pliny the Younger believed that Cornelia, a buried alive on the orders of emperor
Domitian, may have been an innocent victim. He describes how she sought to keep her dignity intact when she descended into the chamber:
Dionysius of Halicarnassus claims that long before Rome's foundation, Vestals at ancient
Alba Longa were whipped and "put to death" for breaking their vows of celibacy, and that their offspring were to be thrown into the river. According to Livy, Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus, had been forced to become a Vestal Virgin, and was chained and imprisoned when she gave birth. Dionysius also writes that the Roman king
Tarquinius Priscus instituted live burial as a punishment for Vestal unchastity, and inflicted it on the Vestal Pinaria; and that whipping with rods sometimes preceded the
immuration, and that this was done to Urbinia in 471 BCE, in a time of pestilence and plebeian unrest. Postumia, though innocent according to Livy, was suspected and tried for unchastity on grounds of her immodest attire and over-familiar manner. Some Vestals were acquitted. Some cleared themselves through ordeals or miraculous deeds; in a celebrated case during the mid-Republic, the Vestal
Tuccia, accused of unchastity, carried water in a
sieve to prove her innocence; Livy's epitomator (Per. 20) claims that she was condemned nevertheless but in all other sources she was acquitted. (1905) == House of the Vestals ==