Who Were the Vestal Virgins?

The Vestal Virgins were the six priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, who served Rome for thirty years and guarded the sacred fire that was believed to keep the city itself alive. Chosen as young girls between the ages of six and ten, they left their families, swore a vow of chastity, and lived in the Atrium Vestae (House of the Vestals) in the Roman Forum, where they performed rituals that touched nearly every major event in Roman public life, from the harvest to the election of consuls. For an overview of the gods they served, see Roman Religion and Mythology, and for the wider world they inhabited, see Roman Society and Daily Life.

The Goddess and the Flame

Vesta was the divine personification of the hearth fire, the symbol of continuity in every Roman household, and by extension of the city of Rome itself. In each home the family hearth was sacred, but in the state cult the heart of the city was the Temple of Vesta, a small round shrine in the Roman Forum near the House of the Vestals. Inside it burned a fire that was never allowed to go out. Romans believed that the safety, fertility, and very existence of Rome depended on that flame; if it died, the city would fall. The Vestals’ central duty was to keep it burning, feeding it with oak and pine logs and watching it through the night.

The cult of Vesta was among the oldest in Rome, traditionally founded by Numa Pompilius, the second king, around the 8th or 7th century BCE. Numa is also credited with creating the college of Vestals themselves, modeled, the Romans believed, on the Greek priestesses of the hearth goddess Hestia. By the late Republic and into the Empire, the cult had become one of the most respected religious institutions in the city, and its priestesses were figures of awe.

How a Girl Became a Vestal

A Vestal was selected by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of Rome, from a pool of freeborn candidates aged between six and ten. The choice was considered so sacred that the Pontifex Maximus could in theory take a girl from any family, even against her parents’ wishes, although in practice candidates usually came from the patrician and equestrian classes. Once chosen, the girl was lifted from her parents’ authority, freed from patria potestas, and legally adopted by the state. She was given a long white robe, a white veil called the suffibulum, and a distinctive headdress, and she was taught her duties in the House of the Vestals.

Her service lasted thirty years, divided into three decades. In the first ten years she was a novice, learning the rituals. In the second decade she performed the priestly duties and tended the flame. In the third she taught the novices. After thirty years she was free to leave, marry, and reclaim a normal Roman life — although, as the historian Plutarch noted wryly, few former Vestals actually chose to marry, since by then their habits and age made it unlikely.

Six at a Time, Plus the Chief

The college always contained six Vestals, plus the Virgo Vestalis Maxima, the senior priestess who directed the others. The six were a tiny but extraordinarily visible group, easily recognized in public by their white robes and the ribbon, the vittae, that bound their hair. They sat in places of honor at games and public spectacles, were given a front-row box at the Colosseum by the emperor Domitian, and traveled through the streets accompanied by lictors.

Sacred Duties and Political Power

Although the Vestals’ primary task was the guardianship of the eternal fire, their duties extended far beyond it. They prepared the mola salsa, the salted flour sprinkled on sacrificial animals at every public rite in Rome, a humble-sounding task that was absolutely essential to the city’s religious life. They fetched water from the sacred spring of Juturna and from the fountain of Egeria, water that was used in the rituals of the Lupercalia and other ceremonies. They preserved sacred objects connected to the founding of Rome, including what was believed to be the palladium, a wooden image of Athena said to have been brought from Troy by Aeneas.

Their social and political power was remarkable for a community of women in a deeply patriarchal society. A Vestal could intercede on behalf of condemned prisoners, and the sight of a Vestal on the steps of a magistrate’s tribunal was enough to halt an execution. She could free any slave who happened to pass her in the street, by touching him and declaring him free. She had her own box at the theater. She did not take an oath in the usual legal way — instead, the Pontifex Maximus swore on her behalf. In the Forum, she could walk freely among men without scandal. In an era when respectable Roman women were expected to stay at home, the Vestals lived in plain view of the whole city.

The Punishment for Breaking the Vow

The Vestal’s vow of chastity was the keystone of her sacred role. If a Vestal allowed the sacred fire to die out, she was scourged by the Pontifex Maximus, and the flame was rekindled using a primitive fire-drill, the only “pure” form of fire. If she broke her vow of virginity, however, the penalty was far more severe. The priestess was stripped of her vestments, scourged, and then, by the law established under the Republic, buried alive at the Colosseum’s location along the Vicus Urbius, sometimes identified with the area later called the Campus Sceleratus, the “Field of the Wicked.” The man who had seduced her was whipped to death in the Forum.

The most famous such case came in 114 CE under the emperor Trajan. Three Vestals, including the chief Cornelia, were convicted of unchastity. Cornelia famously protested her innocence from the very steps of the prison chamber, calling on Vesta and the other gods to witness that she had not deserved such a fate, and her story, recorded by Pliny the Younger, became one of the most quoted episodes in Latin literature. Two of the others were executed, and the lover of one was burned alive in the Comitium.

The End of the College

The Vestals survived the rise of Christianity for almost a century. The emperor Theodosius I finally abolished the cult in 394 CE, when he suppressed the last remaining pagan rites. The sacred fire was extinguished, the temple was closed, and the priestesses were pensioned off. With them disappeared one of the oldest religious institutions in the Western world, an institution that had watched the entire arc of Roman history, from the kings to the fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE.