The Virginity of the Vestals - an Example of Male Dominion over Women in Ancient Roman Society

The virginity of the Vestals

An example of male dominion over women in Ancient Roman society

Every human civilization whether recent or ancient, advanced or underdeveloped, has or had grown throughout its history a cult centered on the devotion of a female divinity who is worshipped for her reproductive abilities and sexual power: this mother-goddess, symbol of the feminine generative energy, finds her place in every religion, but in those societies particularly pervaded by male chauvinist values and based on an androcentric view of the world, its veneration could take a longer time to be accepted, precisely as in the case of the Classical world. Glorifying military and virile virtues, Roman society was since its beginning inclined to culturally reduce and proscribe what we can call the “Sacred Feminine” through a weakening process of the female sexuality as life-bearer and moreover through the mother-goddess’ desexualization, as happened rather evidently with the cult of Vesta, virgin deity of the heart, home and family in Roman religion . She borrowed all the features of the Greek goddess Hestia, characterizing herself as begetter and protector of humankind and rightfully entering the long list of female divinities that in every different culture are meant to safeguard men from extinction.

However what is actually peculiar is not the idolization itself but how it is practiced: already from the monarchic age the temple of Vesta was in fact ministered by six young virgin girls who had the task to keep alive and burning the fire traditionally lighted right in front of the deity’s statue as prescribed by Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome and “Pontifex Maximus”. This practice kept on going through the republican and imperial ages too and the Vestals kept being maintained by the state as the only full time priestesses of the Ancient society until the arrival of Christianity. Usually they were a little selected group whose members were chosen among the aristocracy of the city and, although they were religious figures, their life was far from being one of hardships and deprivations; on the contrary most of the times they enjoyed the luxuries and freedoms of their own noble extraction. Nevertheless a major feature differentiated their condition from that of the women belonging to their same social class, and that was the perpetual vow of chastity and celibacy they were supposed to accept in order to become Vestals .

Even if this kind of oath taken in a civilization that the ancient sources portray us as liberal and open-minded from the sexual point of view could look out of place, we need to understand that the role of these girls represented a separation and an exception to the regular social context women were used to in Rome. Here femininity was indeed defined only in terms of marriage and reproduction: a woman was properly