Vesta received a cult unlike any other major deity in Rome: no cult statue stood inside her temple, and worship centred entirely on a single fire that officials insisted must never go out. The temple itself, round rather than rectangular, recalled the shape of an early Roman hut and stood among the oldest structures in the Forum, tradition crediting its founding to Numa Pompilius at the city's own beginning. When the flame died, Romans read the failure as a prodigy, a sign that something in the relationship between the city and its gods had gone wrong, and the fire was not simply relit from an ordinary source. It was kindled fresh by friction, a drill worked against a board of a particular wood, so that the state's flame always began from nothing borrowed.
Tending it fell to six priestesses, the Vestal Virgins, chosen as girls between six and ten and bound to thirty years of service and chastity. Rome gave them a legal position no other woman in the city held: released from a father's or husband's authority, able to own property and make a will in their own name, able to give testimony without swearing an oath, preceded through the streets by a lictor, and granted seats of honor at public games. The privilege and the risk ran together. A Vestal who let the fire die was flogged; one who broke her vow of chastity, an offense the Romans called incestum, faced live burial, the harshest penalty Roman religious law imposed on anyone. An institution built around an absence, no image and for most of its history no myth of its own, nonetheless commanded some of the widest legal standing and the steepest legal risk in the entire Roman world.