Law, Religion, and Constitution of the Vestal Virgins

The aim of this paper is to put the Vestals at the center of legal, religious, and political life in the Roman republic as was done by lawyers, historians, and poets. With their virgin bodies they represented the separation of the legal, religious, and political spheres of Roman life, the domestication of raw power through division. As sovereign figures, the Vestals would wander freely among the religious world of the aedes Vestae, in which they were subject to the sacral jurisdiction of the pontifex maximus, the legal world, where they acted as personae sui iuris, and the political Rome, in which magistrates would honor them as symbols of the state, lowering their fasces before the Vestals' "public virginity." As a "living constitution" or "totem" of the republic, the Vestals stood as guardians at the border of civilization and chaos.