Vestial Virgins a good job? I don’t think so. In some cases the Vestial Virgins were sacrificed after a ritual defloration.
No they were only killed (buried alive) if they broke their vow of chastity. Otherwise they were free from the legal restrictions faced by Roman women. They didn’t need a male guardian to transact business, could write their own wills, inheirit property. And after 30 yrs of service they were free to marry with a state dowry.
I think the OP is asking when the worship of Jupiter ended. That some elements of paganism survive in Christianity today is beside the point.
According to Joseph Campbell, some of them were assigned to guard a flame for a period of time until it was extinguished, when the flame was extinguished, they were ritually deflowered and then killed.
This seems highly unlikely to me. The Romans were horified by the idea of human sacrafice.
You’re talking about people who watched humans fight to the death, had emporers who were barking mad, and executed people in a very slow and painful manner. Don’t forget that Roman culture endured for over a thousand years and during that time there were many changes, so it’s entirely possible that they could have engaged in human sacrifice at one point in their history and then repudiated it at another.
To the modern mind it seems very inconsistent, but the Romans thought of human sacrifice as barbaric. However on a small number of occasions, in very desparate circumstances, the Romans did resort to it.
As for sacrificing Vestal virgins - no way. This was a postion of honour and status, the virgins frequently being of the best families in the city. I don’t know of any religion where it is the priests and priestesses get sacrificed! The whole thing is utter nonsense.
Until you can find a cite with as much weight as the writings of Campbell, I’m afraid I’m not going to buy it. In Joseph Campbell’s Masks of Gods series and in The Golden Bough there’s plenty of discussion of priests and priestesses being sacrificed, heck, even the Gods sacrificed themselves in a number of religions besides Christianity.
It varied. Frequently, the only clear duties were to preside at occasional sacrifices. No particular piety was needed; the position of priest was often one which wealthy people would bid for, as a way of showing their support for their community. The payoff would be in terms of social prestige. (Think of it as something like president of the Rotary Club.)
This wouldn’t have seemed at all odd to Romans. It was quite basic to their approach that rich people would increase the respect given to them by paying for community services – endowing free baths, paying all the expenses for a public entertainment, funding free meals, serving as magistrate, serving as priest …
Romans weren’t conducting human sacrifice by the time of the late Republic, at least. It had been made illegal by Crassus in 97BCE, and even before then, the Romans were saying about their enemies, like the Carthaginians and the Gauls, “Look at how evil and barbaric these people are for conducting human sacrifices.”
There almost definately were human sacrifices in the early Republic (and probably as late as 113 BCE), but, at least by then, it wasn’t a regular occurence. If Campbell is saying it happened with any regularity, I’d like to see where he draws that from. (and, you know, for all the respect Campbell deserves, he did sometimes, I think, try too hard to reduce every religion to a single model.)
Campbell didn’t give a time frame for when it would have occured, nor much on the frequency (other than they guarded the flame for X number of years), as it was basically a footnote in one of the books of his that I read. Certainly explains the “I’m sorry.” response in Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I, though. Campbell certainly was guilty of over-simplifying at times, that’s true.
No, the “I’m sorry” meant that Mel was sorry that the Vestal Virgin couldn’t have sex.
Anyway, the person of a Vestal Virgin was sacred. Even if she broke her vows by unchastity she could not be harmed in any way. So she was taken to a chamber, given a small amount of bread and oil, and sealed in forever.
They were definately never candidates for human sacrifice, much less ritual defloration, although they could marry after their term of service was complete.
Yeah, I know.
I’ll see if I can’t dig up Campbell’s book this weekend and find the exact quote and his source for the comment.
Suetonius says about the cruelty of Tiberius:
But when he’s saying that, he means sacrificed to Tiberius’s cruelty, not to the gods.
I would LOVE to see a cite for Romans sacrificing Vestal virgins. Oh, and please don’t give me a page name in Campbell - give me the primary source he cites.
“Embrace and Extend”
Er, the part where Suetonius specifies the Vestal Virgins must have gotten lost in translation.
(There’s also the problem that taking Suetonius at face value is kind of like deriving modern American history from The Clinton Chronicles and Farenheit 9/11, but that’s another subject.)
Right…Suetonius wasn’t talking about Vestal Virgins, but the virgin daughters of Tiberius’s enemies. However, that’s the only place so far that I’ve been able to find the “virgins raped and murdered as a matter of public policy” idea.
Okay, I’ve dug through the books, and here’s the gist of what I could find. Campbell uses the term “vestal virgin” as a bit of a catchall phrase to describe persons who held identical positions in societies around the world, as the Roman vestal virgins: i. e. someone who was prohibited from having sex and spent X number of their years guarding a flame. Only once does he refer to the Roman version of the vestal virgin, and at that point, he does not say anything about them being sacrificed. However, in discussing vestal virgins in other parts of the world, he does state that they were routinely sacrificed in manners similar to the one I described. Additionally, he discusses rituals and tales which contain echoes of similar events, that he assumes harken back to a period of time when human sacrifice must have been more common.
So, it seems that I was mistaken in my assertation. I will point out that since the Romans borrowed a lot of their religions from various people’s in the area (including, IIRC, the Etruscans who were the dominate people in Italy before the Romans and were said to have engaged in human sacrifice), that they potentially adopted the concept of the vestal virgin from a society which did sacrifice virgins. Of course, the question remains: Was human sacrifice stripped from the vestal virgin rites before or after they were adopted by the Romans? To that, I have no answer.
(1) Er, excuse me, folks, but…
…wouldn’t killing a Vestal (or an equivalent guardian-of-the-holy-site) for the fault of allowing the sacred hearth to flame out or breaking their vows (or equivalent dereliction of duty), constitute an execution, rather than a “sacrifice”? (IF it happened)
(2) spoke-, that’s precisely what FriendRob and UDS are saying: as Christianity became “mainstreamed” into GraecoRoman culture, there was a bidirectional syncretism of social and cultural traditions, practices and philosophies. Yet that does not mean that the end product is any less Christian, or that the spirit of G-R paganism really lives on in anything but ritual externalities. The forms of the liturgy, the stylings of the clergy (e.g. dioceses and vicars – the basic organizational structures of Diocletian’s administrative division of the Empire), and the folk-cultural practices (patron-saint festivals, icons, holidays) were in part co-opted by the Church, and in part simply brought in by the converts who just chose to not forsake some things they were comfortable with.