ABSTRACT
The mythology of the Vestal Virgins is on the move. Our mythology. The spinster dons of ancient Rome (Balsdon’s vision of a JulioClaudian Oxbridge1) have had their day. So too have the pagan nuns of the Roman forum-Christian holiness and self-denial avant la lettre.2 Our Vestals are much stranger than that: they are touched with a primitive, anthropological ‘weirdness’; key players in a game of sexual ambiguity (interstitiality, marginality, anomaly, paradox and mediation) that in Balsdon’s time would have seemed-if anything-the concern of ethnography rather than Classics. But not now. We have decided to take the Vestals seriously-at the cost of turning them into a model of primitive strangeness, forever lodged at the heart of sophisticated Rome.
