From the early days of the Roman Republic, if not from the time of the Roman Kingdom, the House of the Vestals served as the residence of Rome’s most important priesthood. It was here that the city’s six vestal virgins lived, priestesses whose task it was to make sure the sacred hearth in the Temple of Vesta kept burning.
Who Were the Vestal Virgins?
The Vestal Virgins were among Rome’s most revered and distinctive priestesses. Selected from patrician families when they were just children, these young girls committed to a 30-year tenure marked by strict chastity, intense religious responsibility, and significant social privileges. At the heart of their duties was tending the sacred flame of Vesta, symbolising Rome’s eternal vitality and stability.
Should the temple’s flame go out, that would mean negligence on the part of the Vestals and spell disaster for the Roman state, at least according to Roman superstition. Just as disastrous as the fire going out would be if one of the priestesses attending it were no longer thought to be pure or virginal: a transgression which, if believed to be true, resulted in the offender being walled up alive and her co-culprit flogged to death.
To soften the grim prospect of meeting such a dreadful fate, the Romans sweetened the deal with a host of special privileges. First and foremost, a Vestal was freed from patria potestas — that is, the legal control of her father, something all other unmarried Roman women endured. Admittedly, the paternal role was instead taken up by the Pontifex Maximus, but there were some other perks. She could ride around the city in a carpentum (carriage), had seats reserved for her at the public games, and even enjoyed burial rights (outside a walled cave if she was lucky).
The Prestige of the Vestals & the Curious Case of Caligula
To understand just how prestigious the Vestal Virgins were in ancient Rome, we only need to glance at the peculiar reign of Caligula. Infamous for engaging in incest with his sisters and elevating them to previously unimagined status, Caligula ensured that oaths of allegiance sworn throughout the empire explicitly included the phrase “and his sisters.”
Coins from his reign proudly announce them as sorores Augustae—the “Augustan Sisters”—and he even conferred upon his sisters and grandmother Antonia the privileges reserved exclusively for honorary Vestal Virgins. Most shockingly of all, Caligula went so far as to name his favourite sister, Drusilla, as his heir apparent — a move that would’ve stunned his contemporaries. (Keep in mind, Rome’s nascent monarchy was barely out of its cradle, and Caligula may well have drawn inspiration from foreign rulers like Egypt’s Cleopatra in shaping his own autocratic vision.)
Coins, often far more reliable than the scandal-mongering scribbles of historians like Suetonius, paint a picture not of sordid scandal but of public pride and propaganda. Under Caligula, coins gave us our first-ever instance of a female portrait appearing on both sides of a coin (honouring his mother, Agrippina the Elder), and provided the earliest examples of living imperial women, his sisters, being portrayed and explicitly identified by name.
Moreover, the goddess Vesta—embodying security, purity, and stability—figured prominently on coinage issued by Caligula. The message couldn’t be clearer: by invoking Vesta’s divine securitas, Caligula was positioning his imperial family as Rome’s safeguard against chaos.
For a kinder, perhaps psychoanalytical interpretation of Caligula’s intense bond with his sisters, consider this: he was deeply traumatised from a childhood rife with betrayal and death, desperately lonely, and determined at all costs to hold surviving family members close—not merely for political show, but genuinely for mutual emotional security.
Below, you can listen to a podcast in which I talk more about Caligula’s sex life.
Strangely enough, a Vestal Virgin also had the power to save life. For if a vestal encountered a condemned man on the day of his execution, it was decreed that she had the power to pardon him.
The House of the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum
The oldest surviving part of the House of the Vestals seems to date from the Archaic Period, as evidenced by the fact it belies the Imperial ground level by a metre. When he became pontifex maximus in 12 BC, Augustus took up residence on the Palatine and left the Regia (originally the palace of Rome’s Etruscan kings and then the house of the pontifex maximus) for the vestals. They incorporated this into their atrium but didn’t have long to enjoy it: the complex was devastated by the Great Fire of 64 that raged during the reign of Nero.
Rebuilt under the emperor Domitian, the House underwent further restorations during the reigns of Trajan and Septimius Severus. But after Theodosius outlawed pagan cults in 391 AD, the time of the Vestals was limited, and before the century was out, the House of the Vestals had become a residence of city and papal officials.
What remains of the House of the Vestals
As you can still see, the House of the Vestals was part of a unified complex connected to the Temple of Vesta and the Regia. After all, it made sense that those whose job it was to keep the sacred hearth burning didn’t live too far away from work. Because of its proximity to the Regia (originally the palace of Rome’s Etruscan kings), the original hearth had probably been that of the king. The Regia’s incorporation into the complex, however, resulted in its transformation to become Rome’s communal hearth.
Today’s entrance to the House of the Vestals lies to the east of the temple. It was a three-storey structure comprising 50 rooms — the others were presumably for the complex’s service staff. At the east of the complex was an open vault in which stood a statue of Numa Pompilius, the founder of the cult. The statues that line its current courtyard are all originals discovered on site, as are the pedestals upon which they stand. However, because they were discovered in a pile, nobody knows whether they correspond to the correct original order.
The rooms on the southern side of the atrium are the best preserved of the complex. Archaeologists have identified amongst its rooms a bakery, a mill (with a grindstone) and what appears to be a kitchen. You can also make out the part of a stairway that presumably led to the Vestal’s private quarters. The parts of the atrium built in Cappellaccio are the ones that date from the Archaic Period.
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