The Roman flaminate was organized as a fixed college of fifteen priests, each permanently attached to one deity rather than rotating through general priestly duties the way some other Roman religious offices did. Three flamines maiores stood at the top of the college: the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter, the Flamen Martialis, priest of Mars, and the Flamen Quirinalis, priest of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, a grouping that pairs Rome's chief sky god with its two most prominent early war-and-founding figures and that scholars of Roman religion have long read as preserving a very old core of the state cult, possibly predating much of the rest of the developed Roman pantheon in its present form. These three major flamens were traditionally reserved for patricians, and appointment to them, particularly to the Flamen Dialis, was regarded as a significant, if also genuinely burdensome, honor.
The twelve flamines minores served a wider and more varied set of deities, including figures such as Volcanus, Flora, Pomona and Carmenta, gods and goddesses tied to specific agricultural, seasonal or civic concerns rather than to the state's central mythic-historical narrative the way Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus were, and these positions were generally, though not exclusively, open to plebeians. All fifteen flamens, major and minor alike, answered to the authority of the pontifex maximus, the head of the wider college of pontiffs, which placed the entire flaminate inside Rome's larger, centrally coordinated priestly hierarchy rather than leaving individual cults to operate independently of it.