The Vestal Virgins were a religious organization in Rome that was an organization of women dedicated to the hearth goddess, Vesta. Although required to be celibate for their thirty years, the Vestal Virgins occupied a highly respected position in Roman society. The privileges they received, so often only reserved for Roman men, marked them as a notable exception to the status of most women in ancient Rome.

Livy and other Roman authors state that the Vestal Virgins were established as a state religious organization by Numa Pompilius, the legendary second king of Rome, who also founded the temple of Vesta. The Vestals were both respected and powerful. It is said that it was only their intervention that prevented the young Julius Caesar from being killed in one of Sulla’s proscriptions. All Roman rulers during the Principate period included them in public ceremonies and rituals. Some Romans even believed that they could cast magic, like Pliny the Elder:

At the present day, too, it is a general belief, that our Vestal virgins have the power, by uttering a certain prayer, to arrest the flight of runaway slaves, and to rivet them to the spot, provided they have not gone beyond the precincts of the City. If then these opinions be once received as truth, and if it be admitted that the gods do listen to certain prayers, or are influenced by set forms of words, we are bound to conclude in the affirmative upon the whole question.

No one knows when, exactly, the Vestals were disbanded, but most historians agree that it could not have happened long after the emperor Gratian confiscated their public funding in 382.

Prospects to the Vestal Virgins were committed to the service before the age of puberty, and they were sworn to celibacy for 30 years. Those years were divided into 3 decade-long periods where each member was, respectively, a student, a servant, and teacher.

Their tasks included the maintenance of the sacred fire of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home, collecting water from a sacred spring, and preparation of food used in rituals and caring for sacred objects in the temple's sanctuary. By maintaining Vesta's sacred fire, from which anyone could receive fire for household use, they functioned as "surrogate housekeepers", in a religious sense, for all of Rome. Their sacred fire was treated, in Imperial times, as the emperor's household fire. The Vestals were also put in charge of keeping safe the wills and testaments of various people such as Caesar and Mark Antony.

The privileges the Vestals received were immense, more than most other Roman women. Each of the Vestals received a state salary and were guaranteed state-owned housing in Rome. Their chariots had the right of way. They could serve as witnesses in trials. Their person was sacrosanct: death was the penalty for injuring their person and they had escorts to protect them from assault. They could free condemned persons and slaves by touching them.

All in all, the Vestal Virgins had immense power and influence, in an era and time where women did not have much of that, in ancient Rome.

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