Two of the college's responsibilities stand out for how deeply they reached into ordinary Roman life. The pontifices held disciplinary authority over the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses who tended Rome's sacred hearth fire, and the Pontifex Maximus personally selected new Vestals through the captio ceremony and could try a Vestal accused of breaking her vow of chastity, a charge that carried the penalty of live burial, making the college's oversight of the order a matter of life and death rather than routine administration.
The pontifices also controlled the Roman calendar itself, deciding when to insert an intercalary month to keep the lunar-based civil year aligned with the solar year, a technical power that, because it determined the length of magistrates' terms in office, was repeatedly exploited for political advantage in the late Republic, most notoriously in the years before Julius Caesar's calendar reform of 46 BCE, which stripped the college of much of this discretionary authority. A body founded to keep Rome's religious observances correctly timed had, by the end of the Republic, become entangled with the timing of Roman politics as well. The college's own archives, the commentarii pontificum, recorded its rulings and precedents across generations, giving later Roman antiquarians, and modern historians after them, a documentary trail for reconstructing much of Republican sacred law that would otherwise survive only in scattered literary references.