A Place at the Altar by DiLuzio Meghan J.;

Author:DiLuzio, Meghan J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Legal Status of the Vestal Virgins

When a young girl began her new life as a Vestal, she assumed an extraordinary position for a person of her age and gender. The legal status of an ordinary elite woman was defined at all times by her relationship to the men in her life.96 A daughter was subject to the authority (potestas) of her paterfamilias. A wife might be under the control (manus) of her husband.97 During the republican period, a woman who had become legally independent (sui iuris) upon the death of her father or husband passed into the guardianship (tutela) of her nearest male relative. A Vestal, however, was bound by none of these conditions. In a state that continually emphasized the importance of the family, the Vestals must have stood out as the only Romans without one.98 Having been freed from patria potestas, she was no longer a daughter.99 As a Vestal she was the wife of no man and as a virgin she could not be a mother. While other women were subject to the tutela of a male relative, a Vestal never had a guardian. Unlike a man who became sui iuris, however, a Vestal did not become the head of her own familia with her own potestas. As Holt Parker has commented, “she did not cease to be a woman, but she ceased to be like any other woman.”100 Together with her virginity, considered more fully below, a Vestal’s unique legal status isolated her from traditional kinship structures and defined her position in relation to the community as a whole.101 Her unique ability to represent and even symbolize the collective was vitally important to the fulfillment of her ritual obligations at the communal hearth of Vesta.102

According to Gellius, a Vestal’s legal relationship to her birth family was severed at the moment she entered the order:

virgo autem Vestalis, simul est capta atque in atrium Vestae deducta et pontificibus tradita est, eo statim tempore sine emancipatione ac sine capitis minutione e patris potestate exit et ius testamenti faciundi adipiscitur. (N.A. 1.12.9)

As soon as the Vestal Virgin is taken, led to the House of the Vestals, and handed over to the pontifices, she immediately at this time leaves the power (potestas) of her father without undergoing emancipation and without the diminution of her rights, and obtains the right to make a will.

In this passage, Gellius clearly indicates that the captio ritual itself released a Vestal from patria potestas, rather than any of the standard legal procedures used to achieve this change in status.103 The procedure had to be unique, since coemptio, a form of ritual sale that could be invoked to emancipate children in potestas, would have placed the initiate into another man’s power, thereby defeating the purpose of the ritual.104 The captio severed a Vestal’s legal ties to any individual family and established her as a public priestess of Vesta, fully committed to the welfare of the entire community. Roman sacral law took a similar approach to the

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