The Consecration of a Vestal Virgin

When a vacancy opened among Rome's six Vestal Virgins, the Pontifex Maximus selected a replacement from a pool of eligible candidates, freeborn girls between roughly six and ten years old, both of whose parents were living, drawn from families of good standing at Rome. Ancient sources describe an original lottery among twenty qualifying candidates, though by the late Republic and Empire it became increasingly common for families to volunteer a daughter directly, sometimes competing for the honor, since a Vestal enjoyed legal and social privileges, including freedom from her father's legal authority and the right to make a will, unavailable to other Roman women.

Once chosen, the girl was formally taken into the priesthood through a ceremony ancient sources call the captio, drawing on the same verb Romans used for the seizure of a prisoner or the capture of enemy territory, language modern historians have read as marking the girl's complete removal from her birth family's legal authority and her transfer into a wholly different, sacred category of person, neither simply a child, a wife, nor a widow, the three categories that otherwise defined a Roman woman's legal identity.

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.