Ancient Roman History
Buried Alive: What Happened When a Vestal Virgin Broke Her Oath of Chastity in Ancient Rome
Why did the priestesses of Vesta have to be virgins, and why was the punishment for breaking that restriction so severe?
The Vestal Virgins inhabited a unique space in Roman society. They were the most prominent women in Rome, heavily revered and with privileges no other woman was given. But they also lived with extreme duties and restrictions. Their most famous restriction is obvious from their title: every Vestal was unmarried and pledged to remain a virgin through her thirty-year term of service. And a Vestal who broke her oath of chastity was buried alive.
But how often was this extreme measure used? And when it was, what did it look like? I have been researching Vestals for a few years as I work on a historical fiction novel centered around one (coming soon, I hope), and I’ve had to get into the nitty gritty details. Here’s what we know about the ultimate punishment for Rome’s most sacred virgins.
The Vestal Virgins
Before we bury one alive, let’s make sure we know who the Vestals were.
People ignore Vesta, but she’s one of my favorite goddesses, and was one of the Romans’ favorites too. Her duty doesn’t sound like a big deal today — goddess of the hearth, the fireplace. Modern people tend to think, “why have a goddess for that?” But for the ancients, the fireplace wasn’t just something to get cozy by to drink hot chocolate. It was the source of fire for the house, meaning the light for their lamps and the heat that cooked their food. Without Vesta’s flame, a house was vulnerable and unlivable. Vesta made a house into a home.
Sure Vesta isn’t as splashy as some other deities — she’s a virgin goddess so she doesn’t have relationship drama, and she’s a guardian of the home so she doesn’t leave to have adventures. But to the ancients she was steadfast and ever-present, a goddess without whom life would have been impossible.
Vesta’s private role as protector and life giver to the household was reflected in her public worship. There was a shrine to Vesta in the Forum Romanum¹ tended by the Vestal Virgins, who kept her sacred flame burning. Just as a house must have a hearth to make it a home, Rome was not Rome if the eternal flame was not burning — the flame represented the safety of Rome, and the favor of the gods that allowed Rome to hold its vast conquered empire. It took 24-hour maintenance to keep the sacred flame from going out. The Vestals also prepared the sacred grain/salt mixture that was sprinkled on the head of every sacrificial animal, so in a real way, Roman religion would have been nothing without them.
This legal status of the Vestals was unlike any other woman’s in Rome. For the ancient Romans, one of the essential characteristics of a woman was male control: she belonged to either her father or her husband. Widows with no living father had to pass into the legal control of a living male relative.² Unfortunately, the notion of women belonging to men is not strange to us. But male control of women was much more deeply entrenched in the Roman legal code than it ever has been in ours, and freeing the Vestals from that control put them into a shadow category, a zone that was neither masculine nor feminine. They could make wills and testify in court, which other women could not because they weren’t considered autonomous. They were also sacrosanct — it was illegal for men to touch them — and bizarrely sacred — if a Vestal accidentally met a man on his way to execution, his life would be spared.
After their thirty years were up, Vestals could do as they wished. Many chose to marry (and apparently men really loved marrying former Vestals, which seems like a lot we could unpack but I’m choosing not to). But many chose to continue their legal limbo — if she married, the former Vestal rejoined Roman society as a wife, reentered male control in the household of her new husband. An unmarried former Vestal was still a woman apart, the only truly autonomous woman in ancient Rome.
In short, Vestals were separate from Roman society, even as they lived in the middle of it. They were separated legally, and they were separated from close contact. They were not Romans really, but something else… they were representatives of all Romans, and of Rome itself.
Buried Alive
But I promised I’d tell you what happened when a Vestal Virgin was convicted of violating her oath of chastity. For a Vestal, having sex was a betrayal of her promise to Vesta, an act which would put the safety of Rome in jeopardy. The virginity of average Roman girls and women was controlled in similar (though not identical) ways as in many societies today, but that’s not really what was going on with the Vestals. A Vestal’s purity was supposed to be a requirement for the proper public worship of Vesta, and Vesta’s worship guaranteed the safety of Rome. So an “improper” Vestal would lead to a loss of favor with Vesta for all of Rome — big trouble.
The accusation of inchastity could come in a few forms. It might come from a man — from someone who had heard of an affair, or maybe (though less likely for reasons that will soon be obvious) from the man who’d had sex with her himself, in a moment of repentance.
But, since a Vestal having sex was supposed to be an affront to the gods, the accusation might also come in the form of prodigies. Prodigies were messages from the gods in the form of unexplainable and supernatural events — calves born with two heads, lightning striking prominent monuments, etc. Two examples that stick in my mind are a soldier’s shield falling from the sky and a fully intact human head being found in the ground when digging a foundation. Prodigies sent the Romans to their priests, who would interpret the message and tell the citizens what action the gods required from them.
Some prodigies were good, but many (perhaps even most) threatened doom unless the gods were appeased. And sometimes the omens pointed a finger at the Vestal Virgins, and one or more of them would be accused of violating their oaths without any earthly evidence.
After the accusation, a trial. This was not the same as the trial of a citizen: it was a religious trial with the Pontifex Maximus as judge and the Pontifical College as jury.³ The priests would vote to convict or acquit. If they convicted her, the Vestal would be executed.
The doomed Vestal was carried, gagged, through the streets in a litter that had its coverings fastened down with cords; she could be neither seen nor heard. Crowds followed the litter, but it was apparently a solemn and silent occasion. She was brought to a tomb buried under a ridge of earth near the Colline Gate, on the north side of the city. Paradoxically, the tomb of disgraced Vestals was the only tomb allowed to be inside the city walls.
The tomb was stocked with provisions: bread, water, milk, oil, a lamp, and a bed, as if the Vestal was expected to go on living inside. Her litter was unbound and she was led, heavily veiled, to the steps to her tomb. Then the Pontifex Maximus said a prayer, and all the pontifices would avert their eyes as the Vestal went down, to avoid witnessing the moment of shame.
The tomb was buried, and the Vestal was left to die down there, no grave marker to commemorate her improper death.
The Vestal’s lover would then be subjected to a public flogging. Whipping was a common punishment — the pain was part of the point, but it was more about the public shaming. These floggings could leave the man alive, or they could be carried to the point of his death. Or, if her lover saw all this coming, he might just flee into self-imposed exile.
It was common for upper-class men in Rome to escape into exile if they knew they were about to receive a punishment that would either a) permanently mar their reputation or b) kill them. Rome tolerated this sort of thing and made no effort to hunt down the fugitives — a man who saw a trial turning against him would often leave town at night and face no consequence other than his loss of status. In the eyes of the ancient nobility, that loss of status was punishment enough… but when you put it on a scale next to “buried alive,” yeah, not so much. It was very possible for a man to escape with his life if he were accused of sleeping with a Vestal, and very difficult for the Vestal herself to do the same.
Why?
The live burial of a Vestal was, importantly, bloodless. The Romans didn’t kill the Vestal — they put her in a room with the essentials of life to sustain her, and she died without their intervention. (Yes, I am aware they buried her in there; this is ritual, not logic.) It also offered the convenient out that the goddess could, if she so chose, save her priestess and prove her innocence. (I’m not sure if this was something the ancient Romans thought or just a modern supposition.)
The burial can also be meaningfully thought of as a human sacrifice. The gods were upset, and the Romans were offering up one of their holiest priestesses to soothe them. Human sacrifice was unthinkable to the Romans of classical times, but many of their religious rituals had much older roots in prehistory. Meanings got twisted and lost. The Vestal Virgin might originally have been a scapegoat, which would explain why she was kept so carefully between categories: she was no one’s wife and no one’s daughter, so she had no family to demand retribution for her death.
This quality of being outside categorization, and thus available as a sacrifice, might also explain why the Vestals had to be virgins in the first place. In a society in which a woman’s identity was totally dependent on her relationships with men, the sacred virgin stood apart. When they worshipped Vesta, the Vestals acted for the entire city: they could not represent the daughters, wives, or mothers of Rome (as other priestesses did); they had to be blank slates, to represent all Rome. Virginity meant lack of connections.
In short, a properly chaste Vestal was Rome itself. For the Romans, her purity was the safety of Rome, and when she lost it — when she slipped out of her symbolic role and back into worldly society by coming under the sexual “control” of a man — she had to forfeit her life as a sort of sacrifice to appease the gods. This she did in a method devoid of the kind of violence that would have sullied her further.
Historical Examples
The immurement of a Vestal was a very rare occurrence. We only know of a few instances in all of Roman history.
Most of the Vestals who went on trial in the historical record were acquitted, not executed. In early history, we get the story of two Vestals who miraculously saved themselves from accusations of wrongdoing. When Vesta’s flame went out (usually interpreted as a sign of Vestal wrongdoing), the Vestal Aemilia threw her sash on it and it miraculously roared back to life, saving her. And a Vestal named Tuccia in the 3rd century BCE cleared her name by carrying water across the city in a sieve without spilling a drop. Vestals, as holy women, were supposed to be able to work miracles. Continuing to work miracles proved the continuing favor of Vesta, meaning they must still be virgins. (How or if these magic tricks fit into the formalized trial structure, I’ll never know.)
In 114 BCE came a bizarre prodigy: the young daughter of a prominent Equestrian was struck by lightning while riding her horse, and was found dead with her tongue sticking out and her dress hiked to her waist. Officials interpreted this as a sign of a scandal between an Equestrian and a Vestal Virgin. (Obvious, right?)
Three Vestals were accused: they said that Aemilia (not to be confused with the earlier miracle-worker) had become corrupt herself and then led the other two, Marcia and Licinia, into vice with her. Aemilia was convicted by the Pontifical College and executed, but the other two were acquitted.
What followed was outrage. The Roman people were convinced that there was a conspiracy of priests covering up the widespread corruption of the Vestal Virgins, and that the other two Vestals were also guilty. So in 113, a Tribune held another trial for the other two Vestals, moving it out of the Pontifical College and into the traditional court system. This trial resulted in a guilty verdict, and Marcia and Licinia were also executed.⁴
Emperor Domitian executed four Vestal Virgins starting in 87 CE. This was part of a push toward cracking down on public morality: like many reformers before and after, Domitian believed that people’s morals weren’t what they used to be, and that he could bring back the good old ways by punishing people for acting wrong. (Yeesh.) Domitian was also notoriously hostile toward the senate,⁵ and since the Vestals were the daughters of senatorial houses, killing them was a way to show the nobility who was boss. Since the emperor was always Pontifex Maximus, Domitian ran the trials and had no trouble securing convictions.
The first three convicted Vestals were actually not buried alive. Domitian allowed them to choose their method of execution. Only for the last, the Chief Vestal Cornelia in 91, did he insist on the ancient punishment. Which makes for an interesting point: we don’t know if the Vestal executions I described earlier were by burial. As far as I can tell, Cornelia is the only verifiable instance we have of a Vestal being buried alive. We know that the Romans considered this the ancient, traditional punishment, but we don’t know of anyone else it happened to.
Cornelia used the big public spectacle of her immurement as a platform. She announced to the crowd before the descended the steps: “Caesar thinks me unchaste, me who performed the sacraments under which he won, he triumphed?” Because, of course, a successful Domitian meant the favor of Vesta; if the empire was doing well, then surely that meant Cornelia was actually innocent.
On her way down, Cornelia stumbled, and the soldier accompanying her put out a hand automatically to help her. But Cornelia kept her balance without him and shied away from his touch — a sign to those watching (according to Pliny the Younger who recorded the incident) that this Vestal was so chaste she would not even accept the sacrilege of a man’s touch on the way to her execution.
And that’s about it for historical examples. There are vague insinuations of other Vestal executions, and concrete details of many other trials that resulted in acquittals, but we only have that handful of confirmed Vestal deaths, only one of them definitely by live burial. So though this sensational and very public punishment cast a long shadow over the lives of thousands upon thousands of Vestals who would never experience it, actual instances were vanishingly rare.
Which leaves us with two possibilities:
- That most Vestals throughout Roman history kept their oaths. They were recruited very young, were kept busy with duties that were supposed to be vitally important for their city, and lived apart from most of society. These busy young women might not have been very tempted by life outside their cloister.
- That Domitian was right — that the morals of Rome really had lapsed, and that many Vestals were openly acting “improperly” but not being punished for it. Perhaps it was an open secret among the nobility that people could sleep with Vestals and get away with it.
I’m inclined toward option 1 — probably there were instances of option 2, but the Rome I know was sincere enough in its religious beliefs that I have a hard time believing they were all openly flaunting tradition but not writing about it. I also think that the Roman men who wrote the histories had a hard time believing in a group of women who are uninterested in sex, and felt it necessary to imply that there had to be something going on there (when really, the something was worshipping Vesta). But historically, of course, it’s unknowable.
The Vestals were women who lived outside Roman society even in its very heart. From them we can learn much about Roman religion and Roman womanhood — and we can glimpse the sinister reasons for the policing of their virginities. The Romans held the Vestals up high when they were shining examples of Rome’s piety, and struck them down as low as they could when they became evidence of Rome’s corruption. The Vestal Virgins may have been the six most important women in all of Rome.
Reading List
- Religions of Rome by Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price (a remarkable comprehensive look at actual worship [as opposed to mythology] throughout Roman history)
- From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins by Ariadne Staples (a comparative work on women’s roles in Roman religion)
- Clodia Metelli by Marilyn Skinner (a biography of one Roman woman but also a study on Roman womanhood)
- Pliny’s Letters 4.11 (the source of the description of Cornelia’s burial)
- Plutarch’s Life of Numa Pompilius, chs. 9–11 (a description of the Vestal Virgins and the punishment by burial)
- “Why Were the Vestals Virgins?” by Holt N. Parker (article which puts forward the claim of human sacrifice)
(The links to the books are Amazon affiliate links.)
Footnotes
¹We usually call it the Temple of Vesta, but a Roman temple had to be planned out by augury (which Vesta’s wasn’t) and traditionally contained a statue of the deity (which Vesta’s didn’t). It was also rather small.
²In actual practice, such widows were usually fairly independent. But the fact remains that there was a legal requirement that they be in a man’s control.
³The Vestals were part of the Pontifical College, so the Vestals who had not been accused would have voted on the guilt or innocence of their colleague. Roman juries did not have the same ideas around impartiality as ours — in fact, it was considered an advantage if members of the jury to know the accused well, since their opinion of their character had weight in the case!
⁴This was a big move, the imposition of the civil government into what was supposed to be a religious matter. The boundaries between state and religion were a lot more porous than they (ideally) are today, but still — it was an insult to the priests, whom the politicians accused of not being able to handle their duties.
⁵There’s a probably-untrue anecdote in Cassius Dio in which Domitian invited senators to dinner and had gravestones for each of them made to put in their seats.
