A Vestal Virgin was one of six priestesses who tended the perpetual sacred fire of Vesta in her round temple at the edge of the Roman Forum, a fire whose extinction was regarded as a grave omen for the city itself. Girls were chosen for the office between the ages of six and ten, typically from patrician families in the early Republic though eligibility later widened, and served a fixed term of thirty years: ten as a novice learning the order's duties, ten performing them at full standing, and ten more teaching the next generation of novices before an aging Vestal could, in principle, leave and marry.
Vestals held a legal status unlike that of any other Roman woman, released from the authority of a father or husband that structured the rest of Roman female life, able to own property, make a will, and give testimony in court on their own standing. Their public duties extended well beyond guarding the flame: they fetched water from a sacred spring for ritual use, prepared the salted flour used in state sacrifices, safeguarded the city's most sacred objects including, by tradition, the Palladium said to have been carried from Troy, and their intercession could stay an execution if a condemned prisoner crossed their path.
Robin Lorsch Wildfang's study of the order argues that Vestal virginity carried meaning on several levels at once, a literal chastity requirement, a symbolic marker separating the priestesses from ordinary marriageable women, and a guarantee that the city's sacred fire was tended by women outside the ordinary claims of family and household that structured the rest of Roman religious and civic life.