Rome's Vestal Virgins

Robin Lorsch Wildfang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134151653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date, this volume offers a brand new analysis of the Vestal Virgins' ritual function in Roman religion.

Undertaking a detailed and careful analysis of ancient literary sources, Wildfang argues that the Vestals' virginity must be understood on a variety of different levels and provides a solution to the problem of the Vestals' peculiar legal status in ancient Rome.

Addressing the one official state priesthood open to women at Rome, this volume explores and analyzes a range of topics including:

• the rituals enacted by priestesses (both the public rituals performed in connection with official state rites and festivals and the private rites associated only with the order itself)
• the division and interface between religion, state and family structure
• the Vestals' participation in rights that were outside the sphere of traditional female activity.

New and insightful, this investigation of one of the most important state cults in ancient Rome is an essential addition to the bookshelves of all those interested in Roman religion, history and culture.

1 Within the aedes Vestae

Chapters 1 and 2 consider the various ritual duties of the Vestal order and argue that taken together, these duties suggest that the order’s main religious focus was on purification together with the preparation and storage of sacred flourlike substances that were meant to symbolize Rome’s food stores. This chapter examines the Vestals’ more regular or daily religious activities and duties performed primarily within the confines of their precinct, while Chapter 2 takes up the various annual or semi-annual public rites associated with other state cults in which the Vestals participated.

Vesta

Perhaps the best place to begin, though, is with a consideration of the goddess Vesta, whom these priestesses primarily served. All of our ancient sources are agreed on two central facts about this goddess.¹ On the one hand, she was most fundamentally associated with the domestic fire that burned on the hearth of the aedes Vestae and on the individual hearths of all Roman homes. On the other, she and her representative fire were essential to the preservation and continuation of the Roman state. As long as her cult continued, so would Rome. This last is a particularly important point to emphasize at the outset of our consideration of Rome’s Vestal Virgins. Whatever more precise ritual functions the Vestals fulfilled, their cult was bound up with Rome itself. Without the Vestals and their cult, there would in the Romans’ eyes have been no Rome.

A number of ancient sources also associate Vesta with the earth. Ovid for example writes that ‘Vesta is the same as the earth’ (Ov. Fast. 6.267–268) while Dionysius of Halicarnassus observes that ‘Vesta is the earth’ (D. H. 2.66.3).² Other ancient scholars follow suit.³ Modern scholars joining archaeological evidence to these descriptions have argued that Vesta should also be seen as a chthonic goddess of the underworld.⁴ If correct, this association could provide further evidence for the postulate that one of the Vestals’ major roles was purificatory in nature. As priestesses of a chthonic goddess, the Vestals might well have had a concern with the purification and pacification of the dead.⁵

Other ancient literary sources refer to Vesta not only with the expected title virgo but also with the epithet mater,⁶ and the same epithet is also used in a number of ancient epigraphic inscriptions referring to the goddess.⁷ Modern scholars have seen the ancients’ use of mater to describe Vesta as evidence for the possibility that the goddess should be seen not as a virgin goddess but as a maternal one, giving mater its standard translation as ‘mother’.⁸ Both virgo and mater, however, have other subsidiary meanings, which would not have been separated in a Roman’s mind. As P. Watson has shown, the word virgo was used only of girls who were both virgins (in our technical sense of the word) and citizens.⁹ Likewise, to a Roman the word mater would have meant not only ‘mother’ but also ‘matron’ or more technically ‘a woman belonging to the class of married Roman citizen women’.¹⁰ The use of both these terms in connection with Vesta can perhaps have been meant to signal not so much that she was both a virgin and a mother as that she was representative of the two major classes of Roman citizen women, the virgines and the matrones. If so, then this suggests that the goddess and her priestesses were in some way integrally bound up with Rome’s women.

At the same time, however, it should also be emphasized at the outset that both ancient and modern scholars implicitly agree in excluding certain areas of Roman female life from their considerations of Vesta’s significance. Therefore the argument that is often made, that the Vestals’ ritual duties were meant to represent on a religious level the traditional work of women, cannot be correct. There is, for example, no evidence to suggest that Vesta was considered the goddess of weaving, marriage or childrearing, three main preoccupations of ordinary Roman women. Some of the Vestals’ ritual activities may have been symbolic re-enactments of ordinary women’s domestic duties,¹¹ but not all traditional female domestic duties were re-enacted as part of the Vestal cult. The Vestals can thus hardly be seen as simply the ritual representatives of Roman women, performing on a sacral level the regular duties of ordinary Roman women, but must instead be credited with a more nuanced and precisely defined religious role.

Purification

One possible religious role that presents itself after a close examination of the Vestals’ daily ritual activities within the aedes Vestae is purification. Both the rites these priestesses performed in connection with Vesta’s fire and their ritual use of water are purificatory in nature. So too is the symbolism of certain elements of the Vestals’ dress and their special hairstyle.

That Vesta was in some way associated with fire, and that not the least of her priestesses’ duties was the care of the fire that burned perpetually within the confines of the aedes Vestae, is impossible to doubt. As our ancient sources make clear, this fire was intimately bound up with the continued safety and success of Rome, and even its unintentional extinction was a threat to the very existence of the city and its people.¹² At the same time, however, a close examination of the Vestal rites associated with this fire demonstrates that this fire both symbolized purity and was used solely in rituals that had some sort of purificatory purpose.

Earlier modern scholars have argued that Vesta’s fire represented Rome’s fertility (presumably using Eliades’s definition of the concept).¹³ They have generally based their arguments on the frequent stories of virgins impregnated by a god on their family hearth (foremost among these is, of course, the story of Mars and the first Vestal, Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus), together with the supposed existence of a phallus within the aedes Vestae.¹⁴ Some of these scholars have also cited one of the two ritual methods for rekindling Vesta’s fire described by our ancient sources.¹⁵ Since the early 1980s, more recent scholars have revised this theory and proposed that the Romans viewed Vesta’s fire as both fertile and sterile simultaneously. M. Beard, in particular, has drawn attention to the contrast between the evidence put forward by those who view Vesta’s fire as a fertility symbol and several ancient passages that suggest that the Romans viewed fire as a sterile element.¹⁶ She concludes that this seeming contradiction symbolizes the liminality of the Vestals’ ritual status.

A close analysis of the evidence, however, suggests that the Romans explicitly recognized two kinds of fire, one, simultaneously male and fertile and associated primarily with the fire god, Vulcan, and the other simultaneously female and sterile and associated only with Vesta.

First, the ancient sources, named by Beard, who describe fire as sterile, are in every instance referring explicitly to Vesta’s fire. Ovid, for example, states that:

Do not understand Vesta as anything other than a living flame; You see that no bodies have been born from a flame.Therefore, she is a virgin by right, who yields no seeds Nor receives them and she loves companions in virginity.

(Ov. Fast. 6.291–294)¹⁷

Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes:

Some say with reason that the guardianship of the fire is entrusted to virgins rather than to men, because fire on the one hand is unfruitful . . .¹⁸

(D. H. 2.66.2)

Plutarch believes:

For they also ascribe to Numa the establishment of the Vestal Virgins and both the service and the honour surrounding the immortal fire, which they protect, either because fire, which offers uncontaminated and undefiled bodies, is pure and uncorrupted or because fire, which is barren and unfruitful, is like virginity.

(Plu. Num. 9)

Other ancient authors follow suit.¹⁹

Second and equally telling, those ancient authors, who connect a fire with fertility, always do so in explicitly masculine terms.²⁰ This alone would suggest that there is a division between male and female, fertile and sterile, fires. When we add to this the fact that the Romans recognized two fire divinities, one male, Vulcan, and one female, Vesta, and that these two divinities seem clearly to have had complementary but opposite roles in the Roman pantheon, the possibility for the existence of such a division is only strengthened.²¹

The seemingly most compelling evidence used by those scholars who draw a connection between Vesta’s fire and fertility are the myths involving the impregnation of a virgin by the hearth of her home. With the exception of the single story involving the Vestal Rhea Silvia, however, none of the myths named by scholars has any direct connection to Vesta. The fact that these myths take place at the house’s hearth is presumably the reason that scholars draw a connection between these myths and Vesta. Since in every case, however, a male god appears from the hearth’s fire and since Vesta is nowhere explicitly named, it seems just as likely that the hearth figures in these stories because that was where a well-brought-up daughter of the house was expected to be as that Vesta was in any way involved.

Some few modern scholars also use the phallic imagery inherent in the ritual method for renewing this fire as described by Festus as an argument for connecting the Vestals’ cult with fertility. Festus writes:²²

If the fire of Vesta was ever extinguished, the virgins were beaten with whips by the pontifex. It was the custom for them to drill a board of favourable wood for a very long time, a virgin then bore the fire taken from this into the aedes in a bronze sieve.

(Fest. p. 94 L)

While the ritual described by Festus can certainly be read as sexually symbolic, it can also be given a simpler, more pragmatic explanation and the evidence suggests that it is this explanation that would have been foremost in an ancient Roman’s mind. Both Seneca the Elder and Pliny the Elder note that this method of kindling a fire was the most common method of fire starting among their ancestors and in doing so emphasize the method’s antiquity.²³ It is this antiquity that would first have come to mind for a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Within the Aedes Vestae
• 2 The Vestals in Public
• 3 Vestal Initiation — the Rite of Captio
• 4 The Vestals’ Virginity
• 5 The Vestals’ Legal and Financial Position
• 6 The Vestals in the Romans’ History
• 7 The Vestals in Roman History
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Original Texts of Translated Passages
• Appendix B: List of Known Vestals in Chronological Order
• Bibliography