A Fire That Was Not Allowed to Go Out

The Temple of Vesta in the Forum was round, small, and held no image of the goddess. What it held was a fire, and the six Vestals maintained it. Their office is the clearest surviving case of a Roman priesthood in which the state's security was believed to rest on a ritual being performed correctly rather than on anyone's piety. A Vestal served for thirty years, was released from her father's legal authority, could make a will, and had privileges no other Roman woman held; she was also required to remain a virgin for the term, and the penalty for breaking that was burial alive.

Robin Lorsch Wildfang has argued that the office cannot be understood as either simple honour or simple constraint, since it combined legal independence with a discipline that no male priesthood carried. If the fire went out it was treated as a sign that something had gone wrong in the relationship between Rome and its gods, and an inquiry followed. The temple stood beside the house of the Vestals and the Regia, the small building from which the pontifex maximus operated. Putting the fire, the priestesses and the chief priest together on that ground meant that the physical centre of Roman religion and the physical centre of Roman politics were the same few hundred metres.