From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (26 page)

It is not easy to determine the nature of a Vestal
’
s garment. There is no surviving literary reference to it. Beard, relying on sculptural evidence, identified their dress as the
stola
.
58
But this is by no means certain. The literary evidence for the
stola
strongly suggests that the extra length was achieved by sewing on a wide band, often of a con- trasting colour, called the
instita,
to the bottom of the tunic.
59
But the
instita
rarely appears on sculpture, leading some scholars to surmise that it might originally have been painted on.
60
There can be no certainty about a Vestal
’
s dress. It is impossible to tell whether it was recognized as a
stola,
or whether it was merely an extra-long tunic which was worn only by the Vestals. However, even if we were to assume for argument
’
s sake that the Vestal did in fact wear the

stola,
it would not have diminished in any way the uniqueness of her appearance: the
sex crines
and the
lictor
were a unique and distinc- tive combination which served to distinguish the Vestals and set them apart visually.

Against a background of Roman legal and cultural codes, the Vestal stands aloof uncompromisingly virginal. Her physical virginity, the
sine qua non
of her religious office, was exaggerated into an ideol- ogy of virginity that put her outside each individual social domain. I have suggested that this enabled her the better to represent the col- lectivity as a whole, to be a symbol of Roman integrity. In this sec- tion we shall see how her ritual duties and obligations effectively accomplished this function.

Livy calls the Vestals
venerabiles et sanctae
.
61
The reason, he says, was their virginity. The effect of this sacred virginity on the woman herself was that her individual potential for sexuality and procre- ation was suppressed. Ideological virginity was designed to suppress that potential. For example, a Vestal
’
s tenure of office was not neces- sarily lifelong. The priesthood demanded only thirty years of ser- vice. After that time she was free to marry, i.e. resume the
‘
normal
’
life that the priesthood had interrupted.
62
The thirty years of her service was, however, a critical thirty years as far as her sexuality and procreative potential were concerned. As Beard has pointed out it corresponded roughly to the period of a woman
’
s fertility.
63
Few priestesses did in fact avail themselves of the opportunity to relin- quish an arduous and potentially deadly office, but the rule remained. The requirement that a Vestal serve a minimum of thirty years effectively circumscribed that period in the woman
’
s life when she was at her most sexually active and fertile, precisely in order to suppress her sexual potential. The difference between a Vestal and an unmarried girl was that the latter
’
s virginity would, in the normal course of events, evolve naturally into active sexuality. A Vestal
’
s virginity, by contrast, was inactivated precisely during that period when such an evolution would normally have taken place. She was allowed to give up her sacred office only when her sexual potential was waning. One of the ways that ideological virginity isolated the Vestal was by de-sexualizing her. The tension between a Vestal
’
s

sexual potential and its implacable suppression invested the woman with a peculiar religious power. It now becomes easier to under- stand the extraordinary response to the suspicion that a Vestal had lost her virginity. A Vestal
’
s unchastity was a sign of the dangerous resurgence of her sexual potential. It was also a sign that the con- straints imposed on that potential
—
i.e. ideological virginity
—
had failed. The loss of her physical virginity removed the foundation upon which the ideal of a Vestal Virgin was constructed. It bears repeating
—
again
—
that the peculiar gravity of a Vestal
’
s crime was not merely that she had ceased to be a virgin, but that she had thereby ceased to be a Vestal.

The power inherent in a Vestal could on occasion achieve miracu- lous proportions. A Vestal
’
s prayer, for example, was believed to have the power to root to the spot a runaway slave, provided that he had not left the city.
64
There are also legendary tales of Vestals who cleared themselves of suspicions of unchastity by performing mira- cles. Aemilia, who had incurred the suspicion when the sacred fire was extinguished, caused the fire to blaze up again by laying her sash on the cold hearth. Tuccia carried water in a sieve from the Tiber to the forum without spilling a drop.
65
The miracles were regarded as Vesta
’
s own vindication of her priestesses. In the rest of this chapter I shall show how the Vestals
’
power was harnessed as a guarantor of stability and integrity for Rome.

The Vestals
’
most conspicuous duty was tending the hearth fire in the temple, the
aedes Vestae
. Indeed the literary accounts describing the founding of the priesthood by Numa say that this was the very reason for the priesthood.
66
Virgins were seen as peculiarly suitable for such a task because like the fire, they were pure and undefiled.
67
The fire was also a potent symbol for the chastity of the Vestals and its consequence, the stability of the Roman state. They had to tend it ceaselessly for its extinguishing might be a sign of their unchastity and presage disaster for the city.
68
If it was determined that it was indeed such a sign a Vestal would be tried and punished in the cus- tomary fashion. If the fire had been extinguished merely through a Vestal
’
s negligence, she was whipped by the
pontifex maximus
.
69

The motif of fire dominated the cult of Vesta. Indeed the
aedesVestae
contained no cult statue; the fire itself was regarded as the representation of the goddess.
70
But there was more to the rela- tionship between the virgin priestesses and the hearth fire of Rome itself than the devotion of priestess to deity and the homologous rela- tionship marked by purity. Fire, as we have already seen, was some-

times considered a symbol of male procreative power.
71
Varro calls it the symbolic equivalent of semen.

The conditions for procreation are two: fire and water. Thus these are used in the threshold in weddings, because there is union here. And fire is male, which the semen is in the other case, and water is the female because the embryo develops from her moisture, and the force that brings their binding is Venus.

(Varro,
Ling.,
5.61)

That this symbolism extended to Vesta
’
s fire is suggested by the sto- ries of the birth of Romulus (in some versions) or Servius Tullius (in others), who was believed to have been fathered by a phallus which appeared in the hearth fire.
72
The king in whose hearth the phallus appears orders his daughter, on the advice of a soothsayer, to have intercourse with the phantom. When she persuades a slave girl to take her place her angry father would have both girls put to death but is prevented by Vesta herself. The slave girl subsequently gives birth to Romulus or Servius depending on the version of the story. Thus Vesta
’
s fire had dual symbolic value: on the one hand it evoked the idea of sexual purity in the female, on the other it represented the procreative power of the male. This tension between sexual avoid- ance and sexual power that was inherent in the sacred fire was also inherent in the ideology of a Vestal
’
s virginity.

While fire by itself symbolized male procreative power, fire and water together as I have already observed were symbols for life itself. In the passage quoted above Varro saw in water an equivalent of the procreative power of the female. Festus expressed the same idea but in broader terms:

Water and fire are both denied to condemned men and accepted by brides. The reason is probably because these two substances contain the very stuff of human life. Therefore, those returning from a funeral sprinkle themselves with water and step over fire.

(Festus, p. 3 L)

This symbolism occurs in legal rules as well. The
Digest
states that there were two modes of capital punishment: death and exile. The exile was stripped of his Roman citizenship and banished from the

city. The loss of citizenship, which was symbolically equivalent to death, was indicated by the exile being denied fire and water. Any other form of banishment was not
exilium
but
relegatio
and did not entail loss of citizenship.
73
It was therefore not a form of capital pun- ishment. The symmetry between death and exile was effected by the symbol of fire and water.

A Vestal
’
s primary task was tending the fire of Vesta. The fire had to be tended constantly for if it went out the consequences were ter- rible for both Vestals and City. But a Vestal
’
s daily chores also involved the ritual use of water. Each day a Vestal had to perform the laborious task of fetching water from a spring to purify the
aedes Vestae
. This was no ordinary spring, but the one which watered the field where the
ancile
had fallen from heaven.
74
The
ancile
was a shield, a pledge of Roman power
—
pignus imperil
—
from Jupiter to Numa. There were several
ancilia
for Numa had copies made in order to foil a potential thief. These were all ceremoniously paraded by the
Salii
at various times each year, including 1 March, the old Roman New Year,
75
the day when Vesta
’
s fire was also formally rekindled.
76
Both the hearth fire of Vesta and the
ancile
were central to the very existence of Rome, and were symbolic of Roman identity and stability. The Vestals
’
daily duties of tending the fire and of puri- fying the temple with water from the spring connected with the
ancile
had equivalent value. The prominent place given to fire in the cult and the dramatic consequences of the Vestals
’
failure to tend it made it the more significant feature, and by far the better known. But the two elements of fire and water in the cult must be seen as parallel. They were both part of the daily ritual. Also, the symmetry between fire and water is evident in the mythical tales of Vestals. The stories of Aemilia and Tuccia reveal the same parallelism, one making proof of her virgin status with fire, the other with water.
77

In the very repetitiveness of their daily rituals connected with fire and water the Vestals symbolically affirmed the continuation not just of Roman power but of Roman life itself. No wonder then, that an interruption of the ritual, the most conspicuous sign of which was the extinction of the fire, caused such dismay. The intimate rela- tionship between a Vestal
’
s virginity and the sacred fire is under- scored by the fact that the loss of virginity was signified by the loss of the fire
—
the spontaneous extinction of the fire. We must recall that if it was determined that the fire had gone out simply because of a Vestal
’
s negligence, her chastity was not impugned. But the spon- taneous extinguishing of the fire and a Vestal
’
s unchastity were

equivalent occurrences, both omens of disaster. The offending Vestal, like the sacred fire, had to be
‘
extinguished
’
before the state could repair its fractured relationship with the gods. The culprit dis- posed of, a new fire formally rekindled and a new and unblemished priestess chosen, represented anew a state of harmony.
78

This interpretation of the relationship between Vestal and fire helps explain some puzzling features of the cult. For example, it makes sense of the fiction that the unchaste Vestal was not really put to death but was placed in a
‘
habitable
’
room. She was not
‘
killed
’
in the same way that the fire did not
‘
die
’
. And like the fire which was kindled anew, pure and unpolluted, the Vestal was restored in the person of a new little recruit likewise pure and unpolluted. The rela- tionship between Vestal and fire also suggests a reason as to why the unchaste Vestal was buried within the city and not cast out. The fic- tion that she was not actually killed, as well as the fiction that her tomb was not really a tomb, meant that the rule against burial in the city was not violated. Also, although the emergence of a Vestal
’
s carefully suppressed sexuality made her unfit for her duties, it did not make her completely devoid of sacredness. Sexuality was, after all, a quality inherent in fire itself. This also explains why priests con- tinued to offer sacrifice over the place where she had been buried alive.

The relationship between the Vestals and the sacred fire also sug- gests an explanation of the old puzzle that the process of trial and execution of a Vestal did not fit into the normal framework of crimi- nal law.
79
Despite the fact that
crimen
was the word used to refer to a Vestal
’
s sexual lapse, it was not, I suggest, regarded as a crime in the ordinary sense. I propose the somewhat radical idea that the rea- son the Vestals did not have recourse to the usual mode of capital trial, was because they were thought of as transcending even the cat- egory of citizen. The most striking disparity between the rights of a Vestal and the rights of a citizen was that ever since the passage of the
lex Valeria
in 509 BC, a citizen, when faced with a capital charge, had recourse to the
ius provocations ad populum
.
80
A Vestal did not. It must be said immediately that it is nowhere stated that the Vestal was not a
civis
. In fact, as we saw, she did not undergo
capitis deminutio
in any degree when she became a Vestal, while loss of citi- zenship usually involved
capitis deminutio
either
maxima
or
media
. The idea of loss of citizenship also sits uneasily on a figure meant to be a symbol of the state. Instead, I suggest that she
transcended
the status of
civis
as long as she was a Vestal. This made it possible to