VESTA and VESTALIA. — The origins of the goddess V. in Rome go back to very ancient times: her festival, the Vestalia, appears in the archaic calendar; her round temple in the Roman Forum, repeatedly burned and rebuilt, belongs to the earliest phase of the city’s architecture; her priestesses were chosen by a sacred procedure (captio) of which the only parallel is the election of the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter already in the period before the Capitoline cult.
According to Roman tradition, the origins of the cult go back even to times before the existence of Rome itself: the mother of Romulus and Remus, Rea Silvia, is said to have been a Vestal of Alba Longa; and indeed the existence of the cult can be demonstrated in that city, which was destroyed by the Romans at the beginning of their history.
At Rome, the temple of V. was round in shape. It contained no cult image of the goddess, only an eternal flame regarded as the hearth of the State. It was inaccessible to the public: only during the Vestalia could women enter, never men (it was not, in the technical Roman sense, a templum, that is, a building inaugurated by the augurs where the Senate could meet). It had a small enclosed chamber called the penus, where objects secret and unknown to the Roman public and to us were kept as pledges (pignora) of Rome’s power; among these was certainly the Palladium, a statue of Minerva believed to have come from Troy.
The priesthood of V. was entrusted at first perhaps to three, later to six virgins. These were chosen by lot from twenty patrician girls aged between six and ten and consecrated by the Pontifex Maximus through the rite of captio: a kind of taking possession of the entire person of the subject for cultic purposes. The Vestals served for thirty years, after which they were free to leave or remain in office. At the head of the college stood the Virgo Vestalis Maxima, who could represent the entire college in ritual functions. The Vestals lived in the atrium Vestae beside the temple, but could go out freely. They enjoyed exceptional rights and duties. Their chief care was the eternal flame, whose extinction was regarded as an especially threatening prodigium for the State. For loss of her virginity, a Vestal was buried alive with a modest supply of food, since capital punishment was incompatible with her status. To this severity corresponded the privileges of the Vestals, who enjoyed the highest civil rights and honours (the only Roman women who could make a will). A chance encounter with a Vestal annulled the sentence of a condemned man. The sacred duties of the Vestals were not limited to the cult of the goddess herself. Not only did they attend many important public rites (Parilia, Argei, Parentalia, etc.), but they prepared with their own hands the indispensable ingredient of every public and private sacrifice, the mola salsa, roasted meal mixed with salt, with which the sacrificial object was sprinkled (immolare). They also kept the ingredients of the sufimen, a means of purification, which they themselves had to prepare and distribute to the people during the Parilia. Along with the pignora of the State’s power, one may say that the Vestals held the very keys to its sacred existence in general. This general and fundamental character is also seen in the cult of the goddess, since she and Janus are the only deities who must be invoked in every prayer, one at the beginning, the other at the end.
The festival of the Vestalia is fixed in the calendar on 9 June (corresponding to the festival of Janus on 9 January). On this day the festive cycle that runs from the 7th to the 15th of the month reaches its climax; during this period the purification of the temple of
V. place, so that the 15th bears in the calendars the note Q (quando) ST (erum) D (elatum) F (as): the religious character of the series of days—during which marriages could not be contracted, the Flaminica Dialis could not live with her husband, nor comb her hair or cut her nails, etc
is abolished when the temple’s refuse is carried away. The 9th is the actual feast day, on which, among other things, donkeys are crowned, animals sacred to the goddess especially for their role at the mill (the Vestals themselves had a small mill in their dwelling, probably for preparing the flour used in the mola salsa).Ancient theology identified the goddess now with fire, now with the earth, always seeing in her the foundation and centre of cosmic life. Poets and writers exalted her as a symbol of chastity, regarding the Vestals as her living representatives or images, although the goddess also bore the epithet mater and had connections with fertility (noteworthy is the fact that the Vestals paid cult to the god Fascinus, the phallos regarded as a god in itself). But the speculations of philosophers and learned poets reflect only the mentality of an age far removed from that of the cult’s formation.
V. appears, though rarely, in private cult as well. According to indirect testimony in Roman literature, the goddess seems to have been regarded as present in the domestic hearth (which, on the other hand, was the altar of the Penates). It is not easy to say how much in this view of the literati is to be attributed simply to Hellenistic culture: for the goddess Hestia—with whom V. undoubtedly shares common origins (perhaps even linguistically, though the question is still open)—in Greece was indeed the domestic hearth, whereas the scanty evidence for a domestic cult of V. (e.g., in the paintings of Campanian houses) limits the goddess’s sphere to the kitchen, the oven, and similar functionally defined rooms of the house.