From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (12 page)

modern perspective to compare Rhea Silvia with the Virgin Mary, whose performance of a similar feat turned her into an object of ven- eration in her own right, a symbol of chaste and blessed woman- hood, set apart by the miracle from the rest of her sex. But where Christianity flaunted the concept of the virgin mother, the Romans, having expended much imaginative energy setting it up, proceeded from that point on to ignore it.

The explanation, I suggest, is that a Vestal Virgin who was a mother was in ritual terms an anomaly. She could not be placed con- veniently in any ritual category. She was neither virgin nor wife. This was why she did not feature either in the subsequent adven- tures of her sons or in Roman cult. Roman religion, as I hope this book will demonstrate, was not constructed to incorporate the sexu- ally anomalous within its ritual boundaries.

The mythological tradition was not content, however, simply to ignore the Vestal mother. It replaced her. The tradition here records two versions of the story, which are related but different. In one, the twins were suckled by a wolf
—
lupa
—
an animal believed to be sacred to Mars.
17
Mars was believed to have been the Vestal
’
s lover and the twins
’
father. So by an association of ideas the normal func- tion of a mother, suckling her infant, was in this instance carried out by the father.
18
The biological role of the mother is thereby deval- ued, and the notion of paternity exaggerated at the expense of the notion of maternity. It is important to note also that the paternity thus established is an artificial or constructed paternity, opposed to the natural maternal function of the mother. This is important. I shall argue shortly that it was analogous to the legal institution of
patria potestas,
which was also a method of constructing paternity.

The second tradition about the fate of Romulus and Remus after they were separated from their mother, appears to be an alternative to the first. It was almost as widely recorded as the story of the wolf and is, in fact, closely linked with it. According to this tradition the twins were suckled not by a wolf at all, but by a prostitute. The word
lupa
meaning both she-wolf and prostitute, serves to link the traditions. The prostitute was the wife of Faustulus, the shepherd who found the twins by the water
’
s edge. Her name was Acca Laren- tia, but they called her Lupa because she slept around.
19
While
‘
Lupa
’
, by connecting the two traditions, also evokes Mars the father, in this case that evocation is weaker, for Romulus
—
and Remus
—
are here provided with a
‘
mother
’
. From the wider perspec- tive of myth and ritual together, the
‘
mother
’
effectively usurps the

position of the mother, for it was Acca Larentia who was offered cult and not Rhea Silvia.

The myth and cult of Acca Larentia repay close attention. The ancient exegetists have recorded somewhat different traditions about her, but though the stories vary in narrative detail they con- tain evidence of a base of common assumptions about her.
20
One was that she performed a great service for the Roman people and was for this reason accorded a public religious festival. Testimony comes from Cicero. Writing to Brutus after Caesar
’
s murder, Cicero says that he, Brutus, like Acca Larentia, ought to be granted public sacrifice and a place on the ritual calendar.
21
A reference so casually made is indicative of a widely held cultural perception.

The great service that Cicero was referring to was Acca Larentia
’
s bequest of a large fortune, to the Roman citizens in some versions of the story, to her foster child, Romulus, in others. More interesting, though, is the way in which she came by this fortune. Acca Larentia was a public prostitute
—
corpus in vulgus dabat
.
22
According to Gellius she earned her money by her trade
23
but the more widely held tradition was that she acquired it in the following fashion. The guardian of the temple of Hercules alleviated his boredom one day by playing at dice with the god; he threw the dice with one hand for himself, with the other for Hercules. The wager was for a good meal and a night spent with a woman. Hercules won, and the guardian provided him with a fine meal and the celebrated courtesan Acca Larentia, who was locked up in the temple for the night. The next morning she announced that the god had promised her that she would be paid for her services to him by the first man she met on her way home. That man turned out to be Tarutilus, an old man in some versions, a youth in others, who was enormously rich. She lived with him and when he died she inherited his wealth, which she in her turn left to the Roman people. Thus the two stories about Acca Larentia, though superficially unrelated, have common features. In both sto- ries she was a prostitute. In each she performed a service for the state. In one story she nurtured its founder, in the other she enriched its citizens.

Except for one version, recorded by Macrobius, that all this took place during the reign of Ancus,
24
tradition managed to connect her with Romulus in one way or another. In some versions Acca Laren- tia was Romulus
’
nurse, in others she was a courtesan, who left her money to Romulus. Plutarch suggested that there were two separate women by the name of Acca Larentia. One was Romulus
’
nurse

whose festival was celebrated in April, the other the courtesan whose festival was celebrated in December. But there is no other evidence for an April festival dedicated to Acca Larentia. Even Plutarch, however, connected the two traditions by recording of the death of the courtesan, that she disappeared at the same place where Romulus
’
nurse was buried. Afterwards, he says, they discovered her will in which she had left her large fortune to the Roman peo- ple.
25
The only version of the story which contains a device to make her Romulus
’
mother instead of only his nurse is one by Masurius Sabinus quoted by Gellius. Here she was originally Romulus
’
nurse. But when one of her own twelve sons died Romulus gave himself to her as a son. These twelve sons of Acca including Romulus, were, according to Sabinus, the original Arval Brethren.
26

Amid the complexities of the various versions, the three salient features are that Acca Larentia was a prostitute, that she was Romu- lus
’
nurse, and that her services to the Roman people were so great that she was paid divine honours. A note in the
Fasti Praenestini
recording the festival of the Larentalia on 23 December reads as follows:

The Parentalia are held in honour of Acca Larentia. Some say that she was the nurse of Romulus and Remus, others that she was a courtesan, the mistress of Hercules. She received public funeral rites because she had left to the Roman people a large sum of money which she had received under the will of her lover Tarutilus.

(CIL 1, p. 319. Trans. Scullard 1981:210)

Varro provides an interesting detail about the Larentalia. He says that the sixth day after the Saturnalia is called the day of the Parentalia of Larentina
[sic]
after Acca Larentia. Roman priests
—
sacerdotes nostri
—
performed ancestor-worship
—
parentant
—
on that day at her tomb in the Velabrum.
27
Gellius identifies at least one of the priests as the
flamen Quirinalis.

It is significant that this festival was a
parentatio
. A
parentatio
was a private ritual performed by families at the tombs of dead ancestors.
28
On the ides of February the calendars record a ritual called the Parentalia. This was one of three consecutive rituals, extending from the 13th to the 22nd, which commemorated family relationships spanning both the living and the dead, although the emphasis was definitely on dutiful observance of rites to commemo-

rate the dead.
29
Ovid describes the simple offerings made by families at the tombs of their dead relatives at the Parentalia.
30
The Larentalia was celebrated like the Parentalia, except that it was a public ritual performed by state priests, while the Parentalia was a private family ceremony. It was an apt rite for the
‘
mother
’
of Romu- lus, Rome
’
s founder. The
flamen Quirinalis
was one of the offi- ciants at the Larentalia. Quirinus was the deified Romulus. Acca Larentia,
‘
mother
’
of Romulus and benefactress of the state, was honoured by the civic religion as though she were the mother of the state itself.

What was the reason for this elaborate creation of myth and cult? Why when Romulus had a mother, did myth take such pains to pro- vide him with a
‘
mother
’
? What was the point of Acca Larentia? She appears to have been quite extraneous to the story of the founder and the founding of the state. The story of her encounter with Her- cules has no obvious or necessary connection with Romulus. Ritu- ally however, she does appear to derive her importance from her connection with him. The comparatively large number of references to her in the ancient writers, suggest that she captured the imagina- tion over a considerable period of time, and that her cult was an important one. Gellius, for example, says that she was frequently mentioned in the early annals.
31

It is helpful to put the problem in the context of ritual sexual cate- gories. The relationship of Romulus, Rhea Silvia and Acca Larentia reflects the tensions inherent in the sexual categorization of the female. Of Romulus
’ ‘
mothers
’
, one was a Vestal Virgin, the other a prostitute. Conspicuously absent from the whole story of the birth of Romulus, as I have already observed, is the figure of the
matrona,
the legally married Roman woman. The reasons for this, and for Acca Larentia
’
s prominence in myth and ritual, are complex. A brief and schematic outline must suffice here. I shall develop the theory in the course of the chapter.

The ancient writers attributed to Romulus not merely the physical founding of the city but also the ideology of Romanness. A defining attribute of a male Roman citizen was
patria potestas,
a man
’
s legal authority over his legitimate children. A man possessed
patria potes- tas
only over children born to him in
iustum matrimonium,
by a wife with whom he had
conubium,
i.e. a
matrona
. Children born in
iustum matrimonium
derived their legal status from their father, all other children from their mother.
Iustum matrimonium
was an arti- fact of Roman law, a Roman invention. This was expressed in myth

in the story of the Sabine women. They were the first
matronae
. Romulus was not a product of
iustum matrimonium
. The founder of Rome was not himself unequivocally Roman. This, I shall argue, accounts for the fact of Acca Larentia. If
matrona
and virgin are both ritually disqualified, the
matrona
because she didn
’
t yet exist and the virgin because a virgin mother was a ritual anomaly, a pros- titute, in terms of ritual categories of the female, becomes the only possible
‘
mother
’
for Romulus.

The importance of Acca Larentia in cult is a function of the con- trasting attitudes towards wives and prostitutes. It is an interesting fact that to the best of our knowledge, there was no matronal paral- lel to the cult figure of Acca Larentia. A prostitute was made the object of public sacrifice, but never, as far as we know, a
matrona
. It is important to note that Acca Larentia was never more than a pros- titute. She was not a goddess and nowhere is it suggested that she was apotheosised like Romulus, for example, or Hercules.
32
On the other hand the fact that she was a prostitute is emphasized in the aetiological myth of the cult
—
the wealth she bequeathed to the Roman people was obtained by prostitution. Was it merely coinci- dental that a prostitute was offered cult while a
matrona
was not, or is it indicative of a fundamental difference in attitudes towards the categories of
‘
wife
’
and
‘
prostitute
’
? That there was such a differ- ence is in itself unremarkable. But contrary to our intuitive expecta- tions, the evidence from myth and ritual suggests that it was the
matrona,
not the prostitute that was perceived as
‘
foreign
’
, as
‘
the outsider
’
, as
‘
threatening
’
. It was the
matrona
not the prostitute that ritual kept at a formal distance from men. Moreover the distance between men and
matronae
was deliberately contrasted with the easy familiarity that ritual allowed to exist between men and prostitutes.

Before looking at the myth, it will be helpful to glance briefly, by way of an introductory aside, at the way in which Roman vestimen- tary codes revealed an ideology of sexual categorization similar to that discernible in religion. In Rome, especially during the Republic, dress was used as a visual marker of status. The
toga
worn by men was an unmistakable badge of a free born male Roman citizen.
Togatus
as an epithet was meant to denote Roman as opposed to non-Roman.
33
In fact, if a Roman discarded the
toga
for a different form of dress, even temporarily, he became a legitimate target for criticism.
34
But the
toga
was not simply a mark of Romanness. It and the tunic worn underneath, were used as subtle ways of distin-