VESTA and VESTALIA. — The origins of the goddess V. at Rome go back to the most ancient times: her festival, Vestalia, appears in the archaic calendar; her round temple on the Roman Forum, several times burned and rebuilt, belongs to the city’s earliest building phase; her priestesses were elected by means of a sacred procedure (captio), whose only analogy is offered by the election of the Flamen Dialis, priest of Jupiter already in the period preceding the Capitoline cult.
According to Roman tradition, the origins of the cult would go back even to times more ancient than the very existence of Rome: the mother of Romulus and Remus, Rea Silvia, was said already to have been a Vestal of Alba Longa; and, in fact, the existence of the cult in this city, which was destroyed by the Romans at the beginning of their history, can be demonstrated.
At Rome, the temple of V. form. It contained no cult image of the goddess, but only a perpetual fire regarded as the hearth of the State. It was inaccessible to the public: only women could enter during the Vestalia; men never could (in the technical Roman sense, it was not a templum, that is, a building inaugurated by the augurs in which the Senate could assemble). It had an enclosed chamber called the penus: secret objects unknown to the Roman public as they are to us were kept there, regarded as guarantees (pignora) of Rome’s power. Among these, in any case, was also the Palladium, a statue of Minerva believed to have come from Troy.
The priesthood of V. was initially perhaps entrusted to three, and later to six, maidens. These were chosen by lot from among twenty patrician girls between six and ten years of age and consecrated through the rite of captio performed by the pontifex maximus: a kind of taking possession of the subject’s entire personality for the purposes of the cult. The Vestals had to serve for thirty years, after which they were free either to leave their office or to remain in II. 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 they could go out freely. They possessed exceptional rights and duties. Above all, they had to watch over the perpetual fire, whose extinguishing was regarded as a particularly threatening prodigium for the State. For the loss of her virginity, a Vestal was buried alive with a modest supply of provisions, since capital execution was incompatible with her position. This severity was matched by the privileges of the Vestals, who enjoyed the highest civil rights and honors (alone among Roman women, they also had the right to make a will). The accidental encounter with a Vestal entailed, for a person condemned to death, the annulment of the sentence. The sacred duties of the Vestals were not limited to the worship of the goddess herself. Not only did they have to attend numerous public rites of great importance (Parilia, Argei, Parentalia, etc.), but they also prepared with their own hands the indispensable ingredient of every public or private sacrifice, the mola salsa, toasted flour mixed with salt, with which the object of the sacrifice was sprinkled (immolare). They also preserved the ingredients of the suffimen, a means of purification, which they themselves had to prepare and distribute to the people at the festival of the Parilia. Together 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 apparent in the cult of the goddess, since she and Janus are the only deities obligatorily invoked in all prayers, the one at the beginning, the other at the end.
The festival of Vestalia is fixed in the calendar on 9 June (corresponding to the festival of Janus on 9 January). On this day the festive cycle lasting from the 7th to the 15th of the month reaches its culmination; during this period the operations for purifying the temple of V. place. For this reason, the 15th bears in the calendars the notation Q(uando) ST(ercum) D(elatum) F(ss): the “religious” character of the series of days—in which marriage could not be contracted, the Flaminica Dialis could not live with her husband, nor comb her hair or cut her nails, etc.—was abolished when the refuse from the temple was carried away. The 9th was the actual festival, during which, among other things, the asses were crowned, animals sacred to the goddess especially because of their function at the mill (the Vestals themselves had a small mill in their residence, probably for preparing the flour used in the mola salsa).
Ancient theology identified the goddess sometimes with fire and sometimes with earth, always seeing in her the foundation and center of cosmic life. Poets and writers exalted her as a symbol of chastity, regarding the Vestals as her representatives or living images, although the epithet mater also belonged to the goddess, who was not without connections with fertility (it should be noted that the Vestals paid worship to the god Fascinus, the phallus regarded in itself as a god). But the speculations of philosophers and learned poets reflect only the mentality of an age already distant from that in which the cult was formed.
V. also appears, though only slightly, in private worship. According to the indirect evidence of Roman literature, the goddess would seem to have been regarded as present in the domestic hearth (which, on the other hand, appears to have been the altar of the Penates). It is not easy to say how much in this opinion of the literary writers should simply be attributed to Hellenistic culture: for in Greece the goddess Hestia—with whom V. unquestionably has common origins, perhaps even linguistically, although discussion of the question is still open—was in fact the domestic hearth, whereas the scanty evidence for a domestic cult of V. (for example, in the paintings of Campanian houses) limits the goddess’s sphere to the kitchen, oven, and similar functionally well-defined areas of the house.
BIBLI: R. H. Klausen, Aeneas und die Penaten, Hamburg 1839–40, p. 620 ff.; A. Preuner, Hestia-V., Tübingen 1864; H. Jordan, Der Tempel der V., Berlin 1886; G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2nd ed., Munich 1912, p. 136 ff.; G. Wissowa, in W. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon für klassische Mythologie, VI, p. 241 ff.; O. Huth, V., Leipzig–Berlin 1943; P. Lambrechts, in Latomni, 5 (1946), p. 321 ff.; A. Brelich, V., Zurich 1949. Angelo Brelich