The Vestal Virgins: Sexual Status
and Sacred Status

Sylvia Yuen

The Vestal Virgins led rigorous but privileged lives of religious service and personal purity. As long as they performed their religious and civic duties and maintained their vows of chastity, they had a special, influential, status unlike that of any other Roman women. But those who were found to have broken their vow of virginity were punished most severely. Why was it necessary that the Vestals remain virgins and that those who broke their vow suffer such a drastic punishment as death? More importantly, how was the sexual status of the Vestal Virgins, in terms of the roles and stages in a woman’s life (such as virginity and motherhood), related to their privileged and sacred status? We shall see that the apparently contradictory position of the Vestal Virgin as both mother and daughter was a crucial element in her sacredness.

The duties of the Vestal Virgins were both religious and civic in nature. Their primary religious duty was to “guard the eternal fire on the public hearth of the city” (Cicero, Laws, II.8). The extinction of the fire was a token of the downfall of Rome; the Vestal in charge could receive a severe flogging from the Pontifex Maximus if this happened. The fire could go out only at the end of the religious year on the last day of February, to be rekindled on the following day. The offering of mola salsa, a sacrificial cake of barley and salt, to Vesta and the Penates, regular daily prayers for the state and the people, special prayers and sacrifices, and attendance at religious festivals throughout the year, were the regular religious duties of the Vestals. In addition to these duties, the Vestals were often entrusted with will, treaties, and other important documents.

The deep respect that the Romans felt for the Vestals is indicated by their privileges. Whenever a Vestal was in public, for example, she was accompanied by a lictor who bore the fasces and cleared the way before her. She also had the privilege of driving through the city in a two-wheeled wagon, the carpentum. The opinions and recommendations of Vestal Virgins were held in high regard, and testimony could be given by them without the oath. Finally, Servius mentions that “they alone of all the priests and priestesses have a right to burial inside the city” (Servius’ commentary on the Aeneid, XI.206).

The holiness of the Vestal Virgins involved their chastity. Vestals guilty of unchastity were condemned to be buried alive; it was believed that Vesta would rescue those who were innocent. The seriousness of the crime of sexual immorality on the part of a Vestal can be seen by comparing the penalty to that imposed for letting the sacred fire go out; for the latter crime, the punishment was usually no worse than the thrashing by the Pontifex Maximus. The chastity of the Vestal Virgins was especially important during disasters or political ferment, such as the Roman defeat at Cannae in 216 B.C. The Vestals came under greater suspicion during such times, for it was conceivable that there was “rottenness at the core,” and that it was their misconduct that was contributing to the disaster (J. P. Balsdon, Roman Women: Their History and Habits, p. 239).

Why was the chastity of the Vestal Virgin so important that the punishment inflicted could be as extreme as death? The Vestals were the emblem of Rome’s morality and health; immorality on their part indicated that something was wrong in the Roman state, as in the case of the disaster at Cannae. More than just a sense of morality, or the idea that the Vestal Virgins represented the state, made their virginity important. Their virginity was related to the belief that sexual activity was polluting: a Vestal, in close contact with a divine spirit, could not be defiled by sexual involvement and still perform her duties. As a holy priestess in constant contact with a deity, the Vestal had to be a virgin. Her main responsibility, moreover, the sacred fire, was considered in its nature pure and purificatory; thus it made sense that the “charge of pure and uncorrupted flames would be fitly entrusted to chaste and unpolluted persons, or that fire, which consumes but produces nothing, bears an analogy to the virgin state” (Plutarch, Numa, 9). Vesta herself, since she was “a living flame—and you see no bodies produced from flame,” was “truly a virgin” (Ovid, Fasti, VI.291-93).

The relationship between the sacred status and the sexual status of the Vestal Virgins is more complex than the explanation that it is based simply on a direct connection between virginity and purity suggests. The sexual status of the Vestal Virgins, in regard to their female identity--whether virginal or matronal--was ambiguous. In one sense, one may argue that the Vestals’ main sexual identity was that of mothers and wives, and that they represented the wives of the kings in the period when the cult was still domestic and was practised within the royal household of the city. From her dress to many of her responsibilities, the Vestal Virgin had the role of a Roman matron. Her costume, for example, was that of a matron instead of a Roman secular virgin. The dress, made of pure white wool. Was the stola, a long flowing gown, over which was worn a white mantle of linen. In performing sacrifices, the Vestals wore a large square veil, drawn over the head like a hood, and fastened beneath the chin by a clasp.

The vittae, bands worn around the head, and the stola were the two main items which were also elements in the traditional costume of the Roman matron. The Vestal’s hair, which was cut upon her admission to the Order, was later allowed to grow and was worn like the hair of the bride, in six folds across the head. The ceremony in which the newly chosen Vestal was formally taken into the Order by the Pontifex Maximus had similarities with the marriage ceremony. The Pontifex, who had many of the religious responsibilities of the early kings, took the girl from the parents and led her away, a process which resembled the “kidnapping” of the bride during a wedding. After being “taken” by the Pontifex, the Vestal Virgin was symbolically his wife, and thus the Pontifex had the right to exercise punishment over her, as a husband had disciplinary powers over his wife. The responsibilities of the Vestals may also be related to those of a Roman matron. One may generally associate maintaining the sacred fire with the guarding of the hearth by the matron of a household. Other rituals, such as preparing and supplying the mola salsa and cleaning the aedes Vestae, have parallels in the domestic duties of the Roman wife. The role that the Vestals played in festivals associated with fertility and agriculture, such as the Lupercalia and the Fordicidia, suggests their identity as wives. They were present at most of the greater agricultural celebrations, including the harvest festivals of Augustus, at which they offered sacrifice. It was the chief Vestal who burned the fetus torn from the pregnant cow at the Fordicidia. The general role of the Vestal Virgins as givers of shelter and as protectresses of the Roman state supports the view, as their more specifically religious duties do, that their sexual status was that of a Roman matron.

From another point of view, however, the Vestal Virgins have characteristics which also associate them with the daughters of the original royal house. The power of the Pontifex Maximus over the Vestals can be seen as the control of a father over his daughters: there was little difference in the power held by a father over his daughter and that held by a husband over his wife. Many of the duties of the Vestals, moreover, could have originated in domestic tasks performed by the daughters of the household, not by the matron. Tending the fire had actually been the duty of the daughters, since the mother had other household duties to perform.

The sexual status of the Vestal Virgins—that of both virgins and matrons—appears to be contradictory. The evidence certainly does not allow one to eliminate either of the two roles, but requires combining both aspects. The matronal status of the Vestals is clear from factors such as their costume their hairstyle, and their close association with matrons at specifically matronal rites, such as the festival of Bona Dea. Similarly, the sexual identity of the Vestals as virginal daughters cannot be ignored: the virginal status of the Vestals was an important element of their cult. The Vestals, therefore, were both virgins and matrons. This ambiguity is seen in Vesta and the fire also: Vesta was on the one hand a virgin, and yet on the other hand she was addressed as “Vesta mater.” The sacred fire was seen as sterile and as the “purest of divine things” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, II.66), and yet it was also considered a male, reproductive force. The ambiguous status of the Vestal Virgins was not so much a combination of the virginal and matronal roles, as it was a perpetual marginality between the two sexual categories; their position was as if they had been fixed at the moemnt of transition from one category to another. They were not partial members of both categories, but separate and isolated from obth of them, and thus from normal family and social life.

The ambiguity of the Vestal Virgins—the impossibility of placing them in the socially-constructed and separate categories of mother and virgin—is central to their sacred status; that status is not based solely on their purity and virginity, but also on the unique and sexual identity that made them awesome and mysteriously powerful to the Romans. This does not mean that the Romans consciously created an ambiguous priesthood and reinforced the sacred status of its priestesses by carefully adding further elements of ambiguity. It is unlikely that the Romans perceived the sexual status of the Vestals as contradictory; rather, this ambivalence must have been working in the underlying unconscious. Although the Romans were unaware of the apparent contradictions in their conscious thought, in their unconscious, the ambiguous sexual status of the Vestal Virgins contributed to their sacredness by emphasizing their uniqueness and separateness from the rest of society.