ABSTRACT
As the poet Horace emphasizes, the Vestal Virgins were synonymous with the continued existence and safety of Rome. As long as the Vestals performed their appointed religious duties, Rome, the most powerful and foremost city in the ancient world, would remain. These six priestesses, selected as children and committed to a minimum of thirty years’ service, lived together in a house beside the aedes Vestae in the Roman Forum and were responsible for the care and preservation of the city’s central hearth fire within this aedes, a fire whose quenching threatened the very fundament of the city’s existence, the pax deorum. Along with this central responsibility, the Vestal Virgins performed many other unique religious tasks and duties and were marked out from other Roman women by a number of special privileges, chief among them the right to decide over their own properties and fortunes. They also risked special punishment in the form of burial alive should they fail to perform their most central duties of preserving their virginity and ensuring that the fire on the hearth of the aedes Vestae burned perpetually.
