Taken by the Hand of the Pontifex Maximus

The grammarian Aulus Gellius preserves the formula the Pontifex Maximus spoke at the moment of selection, addressing the chosen girl as though she were already the priestess she was about to become and taking her by the hand from her father's custody, a physical gesture matching the legal transfer the captio accomplished. From that moment the new Vestal entered a ten-year period of training in her ritual duties under the senior Vestals, followed by ten years of active service tending Rome's sacred hearth fire in the Temple of Vesta and performing the college's other public religious duties, and finally ten years teaching the newest members in turn, a full thirty-year term bound by a vow of chastity whose violation carried the harshest penalty in Roman religious law, live burial for the Vestal and flogging to death for her partner.

Robin Lorsch Wildfang's modern study of the order reconstructs this selection and initiation process from the scattered testimony of Gellius, Plutarch and other ancient writers, and stresses how unusual the office was within Roman religion generally, a priesthood filled by involuntary childhood selection rather than by adult choice, hereditary succession or elected magistracy, the three paths that filled almost every other major Roman religious office.