In the Roman Forum there is a small round building, rebuilt several times, where for over a thousand years a fire was never allowed to go out. The temple was not large. It had no statue of the goddess inside, only the flame. The people who tended it were six women who were chosen as children and lived for decades in a house next door. They were among the most powerful women in Rome, and also among the most constrained.
The goddess of the hearth
Vesta, the Roman form of the Greek Hestia, was the goddess of the hearth. Every Roman household had a hearth, and the flame at its center was treated with respect. The fire was the center of the home, where meals were cooked and offerings made to the household gods, the Lares and Penates. The city of Rome had a public hearth in the Forum, which stood for the household of the Roman people as a whole.
Roman tradition said that the cult was introduced by King Numa, the second king, who made the first Vestals. It was said that the fire of Vesta was linked to Rome’s survival. If it went out, something terrible would happen to the city.
Becoming a Vestal
A Vestal was chosen by the head of the state religion, the Pontifex Maximus, who “captured” a girl between the ages of six and ten, as ancient writers put it. She had to be free-born, with both parents living, without physical defect. Before the emperor Augustus, she had to be from a patrician family. Later, the net was cast wider, and by the time of Augustus, daughters of freed slaves were also considered eligible, because it was hard to find enough volunteers.
At the ceremony, the priest led her by the hand and said, “I take you, Amata, to be a priestess of Vesta.” It was a formal name, Amata, “beloved,” which each girl received. Her hair was cut off and hung on a tree.
Thirty years
Their term lasted thirty years. The first ten were an apprenticeship, the second ten were service and the last ten were teaching new girls. During that time, a Vestal was bound by a vow of chastity. After thirty years, she could retire, get married and receive a pension. In practice, many chose to stay.
A freedom unlike any other
The Vestals were unusual in Roman society. Roman women, with few exceptions, were under the legal authority of a father or a husband. Vestals were free of that. They could own property, make a will and manage their own money. They could give evidence in court without being sworn. They had the right to a lictor, an official bodyguard, when they went out, and they traveled in a carriage, a privilege otherwise rare for women. They had reserved seats at the games. A criminal who met a Vestal on the way to execution was automatically pardoned.
Because they were seen as guardians of the state, Romans also trusted them with important documents. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus all left their wills with the Vestals.
The cost of failure
The risks were serious. If the fire went out, the Vestal responsible was whipped by the chief priest. If a Vestal broke her vow of chastity, the penalty was to be buried alive in an underground chamber near the Colline Gate, with a bed, a lamp and a little food and water, so that the city was not technically responsible for her death. The sources say this happened about ten times in the history of Rome.
Modern historians have noted that many of these cases coincided with periods of political crisis, when the Romans might have been looking for someone to blame. The last recorded case dates to about 91 CE, under the emperor Domitian.
The end of the fire
The cult lasted for more than a thousand years. It survived the end of the Republic and the rise of the Empire. In 394 CE, the Christian emperor Theodosius I banned pagan cults, closed the Temple of Vesta and extinguished the fire. The last chief Vestal we know by name, Coelia Concordia, appears in an inscription from 380 CE.
The fire and the house
The Romans thought that a city was a kind of family. A household had a hearth and gods to keep it safe, and the city needed the same. The Vestals’ fire was a promise that, at the heart of Rome, someone was still awake, still keeping a light on.
It is a poignant idea. When the fire went out in 394, it took with it one of the oldest customs in Europe. But the figure of the keeper of the flame, a woman standing guard over something small and precious, has never gone away.
