The Roman Forum

The Temple of Vesta in the Forum was round, small, and held no image of the goddess. What it held was a fire, and the six Vestals maintained it. Their office is the clearest surviving case of a Roman priesthood in which the state's security was believed to rest on a ritual being performed correctly rather than on anyone's piety. A Vestal served for thirty years, was released from her father's legal authority, could make a will, and had privileges no other Roman woman held; she was also required to remain a virgin for the term, and the penalty for breaking that was burial alive.

Robin Lorsch Wildfang has argued that the office cannot be understood as either simple honour or simple constraint, since it combined legal independence with a discipline that no male priesthood carried. If the fire went out it was treated as a sign that something had gone wrong in the relationship between Rome and its gods, and an inquiry followed. The temple stood beside the house of the Vestals and the Regia, the small building from which the pontifex maximus operated. Putting the fire, the priestesses and the chief priest together on that ground meant that the physical centre of Roman religion and the physical centre of Roman politics were the same few hundred metres.

Imperial legislation at the end of the fourth century closed the temples and ended public sacrifice, and the Forum's cults stopped. What happened next determined what survives. A temple left empty in a city short of building stone is a quarry, and most of the Forum was quarried, burnt for lime, or built over. The buildings that came through are largely the ones that were converted to Christian use, because a church has a roof, a congregation and someone responsible for it. The senate house became a church and survives nearly complete for that reason. Others were absorbed into churches whose later facades conceal Roman walls behind them.

Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price treat this as the last phase of a long Roman habit rather than a break with it, since the Forum's religious buildings had been rebuilt, rededicated and repurposed by Romans for centuries before any Christian did it. The excavation of the Forum from the eighteenth century onward reversed some of that, clearing medieval and later structures to expose the classical level, which was itself a decision about which past the site should display. The Lapis Niger, a black paved shrine that Romans of the classical period already regarded as very ancient and could not confidently explain, is a reminder that the site was layered long before any of this.