Vestal Virgin
From prostitutes to virgins: the job might be the opposite but that didn’t make it any easier. Take the year 216 BC, for example. Hannibal had just won a stunning victory at Cannae, slaughtering up to 70,000 Romans including one of Rome’s consuls. Sensing his imminent victory, many of Rome’s Italian neighbours started switching sides. And so, depleted of both money and manpower, Rome was forced to send envoys to grovel for a rather embarrassing loan from the king of Syracuse, Hiero II.
The Romans, superstitious as they were, believed they had run into such bad fortune that year because they had displeased the gods. In particular, they blamed two of the Vestal Virgins who had been convicted of… well… not being virgins. In keeping with tradition, the Roman state reacted to this by punishing the Vestals (or at least the one who didn’t kill herself first) by walling her up alive at a designated (though now lost) spot near the Colline Gate.
The brutality of the punishment came from the importance the Romans attached to the goddess Vesta. They believed she was one of the most important in the Roman pantheon; the goddess of the hearth and home and the protector of the family. It was the main duty of the Vestals, her priestesses, to keep her hearth—a fire in the Temple of Vesta—burning. Failure to do so, so the Romans believed, would lead to chaos for the city and (later by extension) the empire.
The Romans believed it essential that the Vestals were virgins, and this explains why such a slow and painful death awaited any Vestal who forsook her vow of chastity. But there were also punishments reserved for Vestals who broke any other vow. Should a Vestal let the fire go out, for example, she could expect a vicious beating in the dark behind a curtain (the curtain intended to preserve her modesty).
So how (and why!?) did a girl become a Vestal? Provided she was free of mental or physical defects, a girl could be chosen aged between six and 10 and committed—or condemned, depending how you look at it—to 30 years of celibate service. “Chosen” is actually too forgiving a word; the ceremony in which girls would be taken was called the captio (“capture” in English), in which the pontifex maximus would turn up at the girl’s house and lead her away to the temple. Still, it wasn’t all bad for the Vestals… At least they were treated pretty well under the emperor Augustus, being given special seats at the games and some land in Rome’s surrounding area.
