2010/09/01 by Inge Kroppenberg · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Classical Studies and Legal History #Classical Antiquity Studies #Politics #Constitution #Power (physics) #Cult #State (computer science) #Sovereignty #Emperor #Classics #Law #History #Ancient history #Humanities #Art history #Art #Religious studies #Sociology #Philosophy #Political science
paper · doi:10.1525/lal.2010.22.3.418
openalex publication_date 2010/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
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.