THE PATRICIAN ORDER
Excerpted from Secret History of the Witches (forthcoming). Copyright 2011 Max Dashu
Foundational Rapes
The founding myth of Rome shows a woman coerced by a usurper who feared her children would overthrow him. Tradition called Rhea Silvia the first Vestal Virgin. Her uncle Amulius deposed her father and brothers and seized the throne. He forced his niece into the temple to ensure her virginity, thus preventing her from bearing any heirs to challenge his kingship. [Briffault, 422-26] The legend says that Mars then raped Rhea Silvia. Her uncle found out she was pregnant and imprisoned her. His daughter Antho persuaded him not to kill her; instead he sends her into exile and had her twin sons thrown into the Tiber. But they washed ashore and were nursed by a she-wolf. So Romulus survived to overthrow his great-uncle. But first he killed his brother Remus in a quarrel over whose name their new city would bear.
Having set the tone with fratricide, Romulus fortified his new state with new warriors by giving asylum to outlaws. But his new settlement lacked women. The Romans conspired to invite the neighboring Sabines to the Consualia festival, then abducted the young women. The sham battles at Roman weddings commemorated these captures, and so did the customary nuptial cry, Thalassio. It derived from soldiers trying to deliver the most beautiful Sabine captive to a powerful official and, because men kept trying to grab her, having to shout again and again that she was “for Thalassius.” [Livy 1.9.11] To recover the virgines raptae, and to avenge the treacherous attack on guests at a religious festival, the Sabines declared war on Rome. A woman named Tarpeia threw open the city gates to the Sabine warriors.
Conflicting legends explained why Tarpeia betrayed Rome. The main account claimed that Tarpeia was bribed to admit the Sabine warriors, who promised her what was on their arms. This was a trick; they did not give Tarpeia golden armbands, but used their shields to crush her. [Livy 1.11, (46)] Another account says that Tarpeia agreed to open the gates in return for what was on their left arms—their shields—so that they would fall before Roman swords. Both of these stories play on armae (armor) and armillae (armbands). Another account says the Sabine warriors killed the woman by hurling her off the high Tarpeian rock, which became a place of executions carried out in this way. Still others say that the name came from Tarpeia’s burial at the rock. the Capitoline hill where the rock was located used to be called after her, the Tarpeian hill, according to the Roman historian Varro.
Tarpeia is described as a general’s daughter, but nothing is said about who her mother might have been. Was she a Sabine? Tarpeia’s act has been explained as treachery, greed, gullibility, or hopeless love. No one suggested that her act might have been a bold and decisive attempt to free the captive Sabine women. Maybe her disloyalty was to patriarchy rather than to Rome. An elegy of Propertius hints at that, putting evocative words in her mouth: “don’t let the Sabine women have been ravished unavenged.” However, he buries that under his own notion of Tarpeia as a Vestal helplessly in love with the Sabine king, ever since she saw him while drawing water for the goddess. Propertius even has her imploring Tatius to ravish her. [Elegy 4.4, tr by Jacqueline Long, Online: <www.luc.edu/depts/classics>] Ovid, on the other hand, does not even bother to name Tarpeia, and goes back to the traditional legend of her bribery with golden armlets. In Roman men’s accounts, Tarpeia was dishonored, beneath contempt, and they delighted in recounting her downfall.
Interesting parallels to this story appear in the Irish epic Aided Cu Rói. A warrior took the princess Bláthnat captive—“he threw her under his arm”—and treated her, along with cows and a cauldron, as his spoils of war. Because of a dispute over the division of loot, Cu Rói carried her off from her first captor, and made her his own slave and concubine. Later, Bláthnat met her original captor and arranged to have him help her escape after she gave an agreed-upon signal. She tied her rapist’s hair to the bed, took his sword, and “threw open the stronghold.” Cu Rói was killed in the attack, but Bláthnat did not get her freedom. His druid seized her and holding her tight, leaped off a cliff to avenge her “betrayal.” The medieval Irish monks were unable to understand Blathnat’s break for freedom: “an incredible deed for a wife to betray her man. On account of it, judgement went against her.” [Olmsted, 56] As far as they were concerned, she was captured fair and square, and should have accepted her status as sexual chattel. Tarpeia herself was not abducted, but both of these tales turn on marriage-by-capture followed by a woman throwing open the gates to an avenging army.
At first, the captive and traumatized Sabine woman bore no children. (Doubtless they used every contraceptive method they knew.) The oracle of Juno, Roman goddess of marriage, gave a remedy: “Let the sacred he-goat go in to the Italian matrons.” Romulus' spin on this was to whip the women with goat-hides. That ritual flogging was commemorated in the Lupercalia, when naked youths struck any woman they passed with strips of goat-hide. The whipping was said to make them fertile. [Olmsted, 144-8] The women did have children, and this led them to act as peacemakers.
Famously, the war with the Sabines ended when the Sabine mothers, led by Hersilia, rushed between the warriors to stop the fighting and prevailed on them to make a treaty. It was agreed that the Sabine king Titus Tatius would co-rule with Romulus. Some sources say that Rome's thirty curiæ (wards) were named after the abducted Sabine women, for their intervention that brought peace between the two tribes. [Dionysos of Halicarnassus II. 47] But all written Roman accounts except that of Livy ignore their action as mediators who averted a destructive war. Instead “the majority of the sources emphasize the passivity of the women.” [Hersch, 139] Their peoples too were treated as lesser. The Sabines and other conquered tribes formed the bulk of Rome’s plebeian class.
As Roman historical legend tells it, the early kings were succeeded, not by their sons, but by their daughters’ husbands, or by sons of the royal women. It was the woman of the lineage who carried the sovereignty in the monarchic period, though they did not rule. The Sabine king Titus Tatius was succeeded by Numa, who had married his daughter. Numa’s daughter (or rather his wife's daughter) Pompilia had a son who became the fourth king. His father was unknown, according to Cicero, or at least irrelevant. [De Re Publica, 2.33] Next came the Etruscan kings of Rome. Whether or not these successions reflect a remnant of matrilineage, “there was no formal queenship...” As Fay Glinister reminds us, “There is no example of a woman ruling alone, in her own right.” No woman even acted as a regent, except for the legendary Lavinia, widow of Aeneas. However, women had more scope to influence events under the monarchy than in the subsequent Republican period. [117-20]
Another rape caused the overthrow of Roman monarchy. Around 510 bce, the last king Sextus Tarquinius violated the patrician matron Lucretia. Livy’s highly mythologized account starts with a contest among the patrician men over who had the best wife. They drop in unannounced at night, and find Lucretia hard at work with her spinning, in contrast with the Etruscan princesses, who were partying. One of the men was Sextus, who conceived a plan to rape the virtuous wife. He came back several days later, was received with due hospitality, and waited until the household was asleep.Then he took up his sword and went to Lucretia's bedroom, and placing his sword against her left breast, he said, ‘Quiet, Lucretia; I am Sextus Tarquinius, and I have a sword in my hand. If you speak, you will die.’ ... Finally, before her steadfastness, which was not affected by the fear of death even after his intimidation, he added another menace. ‘When I have killed you, I will put next to you the body of a nude servant, and everyone will say that you were killed during a dishonorable act of adultery’. [History of Rome, LVII, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/livy-rape.asp]
Having been taught to fear dishonor even more than rape, Lucretia yielded. Livy says that she summoned her father and husband, told them of the attack, and urged them to avenge her. Then she pulled out a knife and killed herself. For this act she was celebrated in Roman legend, self-destruction being considered as the only honorable response for a raped woman.
Plebians and patricians
The majority of Romans were called plebes, literally the “people.” Livy repeated a saying that they did not know their fathers. This means that the strictures on women were less, and that the plebeians still tended toward the old Etruscan mother-right. [Livy x, 8; Briffault, 427] In Roman law, the child of a full legal marriage took its status from the father only, but otherwise status came from the mother. [Ogilvie, 131] Common women had a low social rank, but they had the run of Rome's streets and markets, and most earned their own bread.
The patricians were named for their male supremacy, literally “those of the fathers,” and formed the ruling class of Roman society. These landholding aristocrats claimed descent from the first 100 senators (also called “fathers”) appointed by Romulus. They controlled the all-male government, and had a monopoly on political offices and the priesthoods. The patricians still controlled the calendar and the laws, which they kept secret. This gradually changed under strong pressure from below, though the patricians never lost their dominant position.
The plebians fought a prolonged struggle against patrician domination. They seceded from Rome in 494, demanding two plebeian tribunes to protect the common people. In 471 they established an assembly of the tribes. By mid-century, the plebians succeeded in getting the Twelve Tables of the Law published and the prohibition of marriage between commoners and patricians repealed. The tribune Canuleius told the assembled plebes that such laws reflected “the depth of contempt in which you are held by the aristocracy.” He added that “rape is a patrician habit.” [Livy, 4.3-4 (271-4)]
The Twelve Tables have only survived in fragments recorded by later sources. The Eighth Table had to do with torts, including magic spells, and its prescription of the death penalty for maleficium cast a long shadow over European law for two millennia. The already patriarchal social structure deepened, as the old usus marriage (based on cohabitation) was replaced with the more prestigious coemptio (based on sale of the bride). [Thomson, 93; Johnston, 127ff] Even the usus marriage made a woman her husband’s property, but there was a loophole: if she absented herself three nights in a row every year, she could legally circumvent his usucapio (ownership based on long usage). [Twelve Tables, VI, 5]
The ruling patricians built Roman law on the base of patria potestas, the life-and-death power of the father over his wife, children and slaves. This privilege was enshrined in the Twelve Tables of the Law, not to be rescinded until the 2nd century CE. [Lyttleton/Werner, 83] Legally, the Roman word familia referred, not to a family of kin, but to slave holdings. It was derived from famuli, “slave,” and paterfamilias meant “father of slaves.” [Palmer, 117; Thomson, 92]
Patria Potestas
Roman law imposed a pronounced sexual double standard in rights and behavior. Table V placed women under tutela: male guardians held them in mano, “in the hand.” The rationale for this male control (manus) offered in the Twelve Tables was female “levity of mind.” [Lefkowitz and Fant, 174] The state left judgement and punishment of women to their male relatives. This did not mean lenient treatment; traditional punishments included beating with rods, and it was legal for the paterfamilias to execute family members. He literally had the right to decide their life and death (jus vitae et necis). [Sawyer, 20]
Women moved into the husband's household, usually as young teenagers or even preteens, and adopted their husbands' ancestors. Only fathers were allowed to carry out the rites of the patrilineal ancestors. [Rouselle, 303] The Twelve Tables denied women the right to divorce (this changed in the Republic era) while allowing men to repudiate their wives on several counts: for adultery, copying the household keys, or “for the use of drugs or magic on account of children.” For a wife to copy the keys implied that she was involved in adulterous affairs or secret drinking from the locked wine cellar. [Spaeth, 59] The last provision was directed against contraception and abortion not approved by the husband. [Lefkowitz and Fant, 173-4] As in Greece, husbands could unilaterally order abortion and infanticide (often by infant exposure). The mother had no say, and her female babies were most at risk. [Harris, William. V. “Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994): 1-22]
The modern romantic custom of the husband lifting his bride over the threshold began as a commemoration of the capture-marriages of the Sabine women. Wedding ceremony reenacted their rapes, because they “had turned out so well for Romulus.” [Festus 364-5, in Hersch, 136]. The bride’s hair was parted using a spear, symbolizing phallic dominance, and a man wrested the bride from the arms of her kin. Both Festus and Plutarch saw these customs as asserting the husband’s power over his wife. The latter added that this power was so great that the husband had the power to give or loan his wife to a friend. [Lives, 22, 63; Hersch 136] She herself had no such rights over her own person. A modern historian remarks, “The wedding took the form of a legal rape in which the woman emerged ‘offended with her husband.’” The groom was not supposed to break the bride’s hymen on the first night. So, as Martial and Seneca show, it became customary for him to sodomize her instead! Whatever her husband did, a wife had no right to protest. [Veyne, 35]
Patrician women were trained to self-restraint, obedience to fathers, husbands and guardians, and to reserve “in speech, act and gaze.” Plutarch again: “great modesty was enjoined on them; all busy intermeddling forbidden, sobriety insisted on, and silence made habitual.” [Lives, 63] They were not to speak in public. [Livy 34.2.10; Valerius Maximus 3.8.3-8] Men warded off dishonor by denouncing their daughters or wives in public, and punishing them in private. [Veyne, 39] When they went out (in early times a disapproved act) they had to veil, covering their heads and bodies rather than their faces. Conversely, veiling was forbidden to women not considered respectable, as well as to unmarried maidens, who had to wear tunics. [Assa, Janine. The Great Roman Ladies, New York: Grove, 1960. p. 92]
The social ideal was the domina lanifera, domiseda, univira: a stay-at-home, wool-working lady who is faithful to one husband all her life. Female patricians were expected to practice abstinence, sexual and otherwise, while tolerating their husbands’ promiscuity. [Rousselle, 321-3] Early Roman law forbade women to drink wine (the preferred beverage) except on set festival days. Wine was the sacred medium of divine communion, reserved for gods and men. At one time in Roman history, women faced the death penalty for drinking wine, as Plutarch, Cicero, and many others attest. Egnatius Mecennius beat his wife to death with a cudgel for drinking wine, reported Varro, who noted that Romulus acquitted him. [Brouwer, 333; L/F, 176] Valerius Maximus commented that “no one even criticized him, because the husband was making an example to other women.” [Schottroff, 71]
Five centuries after this famous execution, Cato upheld men's legal power to kill their wives: “If you should take your wife in adultery, you may with impunity put her to death without a trial; but if you should commit adultery or indecency, she must not presume to lay a finger on you, nor does the law allow it.” [Pomeroy, 153; On the Dowry, in Lefkowitz/Fant, 175] Men also punished their wives for lesser breaches of the sexual double standard. Valerius Maximus approvingly cited cases of patrician men who divorced their wives for being outdoors with head unveiled, or for speaking to a freedwoman in public, or for attending the games without masculine permission. Again, his paramount concern was that other women be intimidated from doing likewise. [Lefkowitz/Fant, 176; Schottroff, 238 fn16]
Cicero admitted the laws were “full of injustice toward women,” but still believed that giving females equal rights was as unthinkable as freedom for slaves or animals. [De Re Publica, 3.17; 1.67, in Schottroff, 26] As in so many other patriarchal societies, rape was treated as a property offense against the male guardian, not the female victim. [Brundage, 48] Gay sex was utterly legal and normal for males of any status, though the penetrated partner was despised. But married women could be charged with adultery for lesbian sex: “... both the Elder Seneca and Martial refer to lesbian activities as adultery, the former suggesting that the death penalty was appropriate when the two were discovered in the act by a husband.” [Boswell, 82]
All these strictures were resisted by women, who gradually threw many of them off over the centuries. In 216 BCE, when the country was shaken by Hannibal's invasion, a patrician backlash enacted the Oppian laws. The Senate forbade females to wear multi-colored dresses, especially purple, or own more than a half ounce of gold or ride in carriages. More seriously (and less frequently mentioned), it required widows, single women, and women under wardship to deposit their money with the state. The numbers of such women had swollen because of increased deaths of men in the Punic War. [Sawyer, 22] Consequently women controlled more wealth than at any time in Roman history.
The pretext for the Oppian laws was Rome’s state of emergency. But decades after the fall and destruction of Carthage, which brought unprecedented wealth into the city, these laws remained in effect. At last, in 195 BCE, Roman women poured into the streets to demand their repeal. Livy wrote that the matrons blockaded all the streets and the entrances to the Forum. The female crowd grew larger every day, pouring in even from the suburbs and villages. Women approached the consuls, praetors and other officials, urging them to overturn the laws. [Livy xxxiv, 1] This “insurrection of the women” occasioned Cato's famous diatribe defending the patriarchal order:Our fathers have willed that women should be in the power of their fathers, of their brothers, of their husbands. Remember all the laws by which our fathers have bound down the liberty of women, by which they have bent them to the power of men. As soon as they are our equals, they become our superiors. [Briffault, 428]
Women were the most dangerous class of all, insisted Cato, if permitted to assemble and consult with each other. [in Livy, xxxiv, 2-3] Cato said that there would be no problem if husbands asserted their power over their wives at home. But since they had failed to do so, “female violence” was trampling male liberty underfoot at home and even in the male space of the Forum. As he passed the protestors in the Forum, Cato demanded of them, “Could you not have made the same requests, each of you of your own husband, at home?” (Several centuries later, Christian scriptures reiterated this quintissentially Roman requirement, in the famous demand that women not speak in church but ask their husbands at home.)
Lucius Valerius defended the women’s cause by citing their contributions during the Sabine, Volscian, Gallic and Punic wars. He pointed out that women were allowed no offices, no triumphs, no spoils of war; at least they should have their adornments. He said the law was unjust: “Shall we forbid only women to wear purple? When you, a man, may use purple on your clothes, will you not allow the mother of your family to have a purple cloak, and will your horse be more beautifully saddled than your wife is garbed?” [Livy, xxxiv, 7] He did not convince the men, and the tribunes vetoed the motion to repeal the Oppian laws. But it wasn’t over yet; the matrons forced them to yield by beseiging their houses. [Lefkowitz/Fant, 179-80] Victory came, not from male paternalism, but from what Valerius Maximus called “the unusual alliance” of women, and the valiant stand they made. [Schottroff, 70]
After this turning point, if not before, Roman women began to breach the harshest shackles of tradition, finding ways around old legal and customary barriers. They drove a trend away from manus marriages and toward free marriages in which the bride retained rights over her dowry in case of divorce, which also became more common. Though easier divorce freed many women, fathers retained legal rights over the children, so that ex-wives lost custody (and often lost a degree of social honor as well.) Roman women, who used to sit while men reclined, now began taking the liberty to recline, as Varro and Valerius Maximus lamented.
An increasing number of women became emancipated, legally sui juris, with “rights over self” and over their own property. Male tutelage was considerably weakened to a legalistic formality and, combined with the longstanding custom of marrying young teens to older men, resulted in a growing number of wealthy and independent widows. By the first century, many women were engaged in trade, some acquiring their own fortunes. Women were now running shipping companies, factories, and other businesses and trades. They did not shy away from defending their property rights. Hortensia, daughter of a famous orator, led another female protest in 42 bce against the Triumvirate’s appropriation of the wealth of women married to men in the opposing faction. [Sawyer, 23]
In the imperial period, elite women exerted influence over government from within ruling families. The empress Livia wielded great political power behind a mask of wifely virtue. Seneca sneered at mothers “who, because women cannot seek office, seek power through their sons.” [Sen. Helv. 14.3, in Glinister, 1997: 120] Later on, things had opened up to the point that Julia Domna could exercise her considerable clout more openly. Severus Caecina complained to the Senate that women used to be controlled by the Oppian and other laws, “now, loosed from every bond, they rule over our houses, our tribunals, even our armies.” [Tacitus, Annals, 3.33] Of course, he was exaggerating by a long shot, but women had created change.
Another backlash occurred in the last years of the Republic. Divorce had become frequent, and the birth rate dropped. Seneca blamed Roman women for the divorces, and it is likely that women had initiated most of them, because now they had options. Horace's ode at the Secular Games, and the speeches of Cicero, show that men were blaming various social problems on female wantonness. Juvenal’s Satires, the pulse of his time, were loaded with misogyny. The poet Catullus moved from praising his female lovers to trashing them in the most explicit and scurrilous terms designed to publicly humiliate them as oversexed, castrating monsters.
In 18 bce, an Augustan law intervened in sexual politics on several fronts, using one carrot and many sticks. It rewarded women who bore three or more children with freedom from male tutelage (ius liberorum). But it also made female adultery a felony, forced husbands to divorce straying wives, and reiterated the paternal privilege of killing a daughter and her lover. The law now defined sexual infidelity by concubines as adultery (by definition this was one-sideded) and men could legally punish them as they did their wives, although concubines had none of a wife's rights. The state even went so far as to prosecute family and neighbors for not turning in adulterers. [Lefkowitz/Fant, 181; Rouselle, 113-4; Brundage, 43]
This law of Augustus was named Lex Julia after his daughter, Julia Augusta. She herself fell victim to it. Her father sent her into exile on a distant island, where she died in destitution twenty years later. [Tacitus, Annals, 4.20; 1.52] What happened? First, look at Julia’s life. On the day of her birth Augustus divorced her mother and took her away to be raised under the strictest control. [Dio Cassius, 48.34.3] Her designated role was to marry the men her father chose as his heirs, one after the other, and to bear children. She was accused of a drunken orgy in the Forum and packed off to Pantaderia under close guard. The old controls were once again in force. As of old, Julia was explicitly forbidden to drink wine. Her ordeal did not end with the death of her father. Her ex-husband Tiberius then confined her to a single room and prevented her from having any visitors.
The Lex Julia was unpopular, needless to say, and in time women overcome some of its strictures. Their angry protests “forced Augustus to recognize a longer period of widowhood before forcing them to marry again.” To get around the law’s requirement that male guardians must approve legal and economic transactions, some elite women even registered as prostitutes. The state continued to back families’ power to force women to marry with extreme force. One imperial edict “condemned all women who refused marriage to be raped or sent to a brothel.” [McNamara, 11-13, 26, 32]
Female infanticide was rampant in patrician families, as Dio Cassius observed: “... among the nobility there were far more males than females.” As a result, men found a shortage of marriage partners in their own class, and Augustus was obliged to remove the ban on their marrying freedwomen. Conversely, after 52 CE, Roman women who had sex with slaves (without the master’s consent) were themselves subject to legal enslavement. [Rousselle, 311]
In spite of the changes women had compelled, marriage still institutionalized male dominance. Augustus told the Senate “to admonish and command your wives as you wish; that is what I do.” [Dio Cassius 54.16] As the empire grew, men continued to exemplify Romanness itself: “the masters of the human race, the people who wear the toga.” [Virgil Aeneid, 1.282] Not only did women not wear this garment, but neither did plebeian men, except perhaps by tribunes and other officials, and the enslaved were forbidden to wear it.
The Vestals
The Latin word sacerdos (priest or priestess) was gender neutral, but official Roman culture privileged patrician males as priestly officiants. Male flamines presided over the great majority of temples, as legendarily ordained by king Numa Pompilius. Men controlled all temple functions of the state, with the notable exception of the Vestals. They controlled even most of the goddess temples; only in the temples of Bona Dea, Fortuna Muliebris, and Diana (Aventine and probably Nemi as well) did priestesses have full rein. [Scheid, 378, 390] (Ceres is a more complicated case, as the state-sanctioned flamen cerealis was replaced by priestesses due to popular pressure.) It was customary for temple sacrifices to begin with a priest calling out: “Away with the foreigner, the prisoner in chains, the woman, the girl!” All these people were forbidden to attend the sacrifices. [Paulus Diaconis, in Scheid, 379]
In addition, Rome had two priestly couples. The Flamen and Flaminica Dialis were dedicated to Jupiter, and the Rex and Regina Sacrorum represented a vestige of the old sacred kingship. Both the Vestals and the Flaminica Dialis wore the bridal coiffure and veil, but the veil of the Flaminica was bright red. This flammeum signified vital power. [Festus on flammeo, senis crinibus] The Flaminica was robed in purple, her tall bun tied with purple strands, covered with a white cloth and pomegranate wreath, then a large purple mantle, and the blazing flammeum atop it all. She sacrificed a ram in the marketplace every week. The Flaminica was also a sacred weaver who used a special ritual knife, and she alone could weave her husband’s clothing. She herself could wear shoes made only from sacrificial animals. This priestly couple was hedged around with many other ritual taboos. Their marriage was indissoluable, carried out by the patrician rite of confarreatio (bread-sharing), and required her virginity. The Flamen Dialis had to resign if his wife died first, so crucial was her role in Rome’s sacred marriage.
Old female-oriented or matrilineal customs survived as quirks in the system. For example, women carried their sisters' children into the temple of Mater Matuta. The names of paternal relatives were never pronounced in the precincts of Ceres, even though the male flamen cerealis presided—for a time—over her state cult. [Briffault, 429] Ancient Italic inscriptions show that priestesses had originally led the rites of Ceres, and by the 3rd century BCE the infusion of Eleusinian mysteries from southern Italy once again put a female sacerdos cerealis at the head of a congregation of women celebrants. Roman sources emphasize this as a female office. [Spaeth, 3, 20, 59, 103-4]
Rome's official priestesses, the Vestal Virgins, were the priestesses of the city’s ceremonial hearth. This institution exemplified the code of patria potestas, with the pontifex maximus representing the state as paterfamilias. This high priest “captured” future Vestal Virgins from groups of twenty aristocratic girls, pointing to his choices with the words, “I seize you, beloved.” They could not refuse. Their hair was cropped and hung as a sacrifice on a tree in the grove of Juno Lucina. [Palmer,19] The pontifex maximus had the right to punish Vestals for infractions, above all for breaking the code of virginity. This was regarded as a threat to the welfare of the state.
The six Vestal priestesses served thirty-year terms. They learned during the first ten years, performed the rites in the next ten, and taught their successors in the final years. Only then were the women free to leave or to marry. The office of high priestess (Virgo Vestalis Maxima) rotated among those who chose to remain. Varro named the first Vestals as Gegania, Veneneia, Canuleia, and Tarpeia (yes, that Tarpeia). [Grimm, 275] Tacitus tells us that Occia presided over the Vestals for 57 years. In time, as it got harder to recruit Vestals from patrician families, plebian girls were admitted, then daughters of freed slaves. [Young; Worsfold, 21-3]
The Vestals enjoyed privileges denied to other women. Freed from their fathers’ authority, they were empowered to own property and manage their affairs without a male warder, to make wills and to vote. They could testify in court without taking an oath. They were entrusted with the guardianship of treaties, wills, important documents, and treasure. They attended sacrifices that otherwise barred women, and played an essential role in consecrating the victims. They were given front seats at the games. A person going to execution was spared if he met a Vestal on the way. Vestals also had the unique right to be buried in the city. But for some this burial was involuntary, carried out while they were still alive. [Worsfold, 46-51]
For the Vestals also had severe liabilities. The high priest had the power to strip and flog the priestesses for lesser violations of the code, such as allowing the fire to go out. As Plutarch reported, “sometimes the Pontifex Maximus gave them the discipline naked, in some dark place and under cover of a veil; but she that broke her vow of chastity was buried alive by the Colline Gate.” [Worsfold, 59-60] The priests tightly wrapped the condemned Vestal in veils that muffled her protests, bound her into a litter, and carried her to the city walls. There, in the “Field of Sin,” they immured her in an underground cell, removed its steps, and mounded the earthworks over her. [Goodrich, 270-76; Worsfold, 60]
This form of execution was said to have begun with Roman king Tarquinius Priscus who buried alive the Vestal priestess Pinaria. Another tradition held that early Vestals at the old capital of Alba Longa were whipped to death for having sex. This looks like a back-projection, since Rhea Silvia, the ancestral mother of Rome, was simply imprisoned by her uncle after her chastity was breached. Later, whipping with rods sometimes preceded the immuration, as was done to Urbinia in 471 BCE. [Worsfold, 62]
Records show at least 22 vestals were accused of breaking the chastity vow. Eighteen of them were buried in the city wall, two committed suicide. There is no record of death for the others. A few accused priestesses were acquitted. Some cleared themselves through ordeals; Tuccia established her innocence by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve. [Augustine, De Civitate Dei, X, 16, in Worsfold, 69] Spurious accusations were leveled at Vestals for a variety of reasons. Minucia fell under suspicion for her rich dress, and so did Postumia, who also got in trouble “for her wit” unbefitting a maiden, according to Livy. Postumia was sternly warned “to leave her sports, taunts and merry conceits,” but Minucia was buried alive. [Worsfold, 62, 66; Goodrich 283]
In imperial times, rulers violated the sanctity of the Vestals through direct sexual force. Nero raped the vestal Rubria. The mad emperor Heliogabalus forced another to marry him, then cast her off. Less powerful men were put to death for having relations with Vestals. [Worsfold, 71-3] The status of the office had by this time declined to the point where Aemilia, Licinia, and Martia were executed after being denounced by the servant of a barbarian horseman.
In times of disaster and crisis, Romans blamed impure behavior by the Vestals for the city's calamities. As Hannibal was advancing on Italy, two Vestals were accused of sexual offenses. One was put to death and the other forestalled a horrific death by committing suicide first. [Takács, 368] Their horrific executions acted as symbolic purgations, much like witch burnings. Emperors found the spectacle politically useful. Domitian ordered the High Vestal Cornelia to be buried alive in 81 CE, refusing to allow her to defend herself, and had another vestal executed. As Pliny the Younger explained,“Domitian hoped to make his reign illustrious by such an example.” Caracalla (211-17) also buried Vestals alive “pretending they had lost their virginity.” [Herodian, in Worsfold, 61, 71-2; McNamara,15, on second by Domitian]
These official murders give little reason to wonder at Plutarch's report that Roman priests performed rites in the “Field of Sin” to placate the spirits of executed vestals.
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