Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Medical opinion seconded the perception that sex was important for women. Contemporary medical theory held that women's reproductive systems and overall health benefited from regular intercourse and the salubrious effects of keeping the uterus regularly moistened with semen. Without active sex lives, women could fall prey to potentially fatal illnesses like plethora and "suffocation of the womb," better known as hysteria. Sexual pleasure was also acknowledged as beneficial. A couple would draw closer to one another and increase the harmony in their relationship through charis, a sense of gracious trust and affection born of mutual intimate delight.

  A chaste woman of the ancient world, in other words, did not shun sex. Rather, she indulged in it with her husband in a manner befitting her class and upbringing and demonstrating the quality of sophrosyne. For both women and men, the various aspects of unchastity, such as excessiveness, decadence, and lack of self-discipline, were to be shunned. But at the same time, complete celibacy or adult virginity were considered physically harmful, philosophically extreme, and socially bizarre.

  Virginity Before Christianity

  Whether dictated to do so by law, pressured to do so by tradition, or merely out of personal inclination, virtually everyone in the ancient world who was eligible to marry did so. In the patriarchal cultures of the early Mediterranean and Adriatic, marriage was (as it still is in preindustrial societies) a means of expanding one's household, of bringing in new blood, and of providing for the future. Because provable paternity was important, so was the virginity of brides, and the honor of entire families was often bound up in whether or not the daughters who left them and the brides who entered them went to their bridal beds as virgins.

  It is likely that most of them did, but not necessarily because each individual woman had an enormous personal investment in doing so. Rather, it was just what was done, part of their culture. Also, the framework of daily life would have made illicit premarital affairs logistically difficult for many, although not necessarily impossible. Men and women of the ancient world had largely separate physical and social spheres, including, in many socioeconomic brackets, largely separate working lives. Additionally, we have to recall that women of the time were usually married off quite young by our standards. Roman brides might not even have begun to menstruate yet, while Greek brides tended to be a few years past menarche.

  Premarital virginity was also encouraged by the extraordinary penalties that one could incur by losing it. Under the Roman Empire, stuprum, or sexual impropriety, with an unmarried young woman was considered equivalent to adultery. If the young woman had been a virgin and it appeared that her seduction was consensual, half of the property belonging to both parties would be confiscated for good. If she could prove rape, which then as now was a very big "if," only the male would be penalized. Murder was also a common Roman punishment for premarital sexual transgressions. High-caste fathers, in fact, retained the right to murder their daughters for adultery even after their daughters were married, and killing their daughters' adulterous lovers fell within their legal rights as well.

  In Greece, too, murder was not an uncommon response to a daughter's unauthorized virginity loss—Giulia Sissa, in her monograph Greek Virginity, mentions a case in which an Athenian archon, upon discovering that his daughter had been "ruined," fed her to a hunger-crazed horse. Additionally, the law provided for a punishment even more socially radical than the economic sanctions that penalized stuprum in Rome. Under Solon, Athenian fathers who discovered that their unmarried daughters had been seduced or impregnated were obligated to disown them, to treat them as "a body that had become foreign," revoking their daughters' citizen status and making them slaves. It was the single circumstance in all of Solon's legal code in which a freeborn Athenian could be forced into slavery.

  To an Athenian of that period, this punishment would have made sense. A daughter's premarital loss of virginity, in the explicitly patriarchal ancient world, constituted both a shameful lapse of control on the part of the family and of the girl herself, and a property crime against her father. As a part of the paternal household, daughters literally belonged to their fathers, just as wives belonged to their husbands and slaves to their masters.

  Unlike slaves, however, daughters and wives could not be sold. A daughter's primary worth, both to the paterfamilias and the society at large, was that she could be given in marriage. The right of the father to give his daughter away was not the metaphorical handing over we understand it to be today, a role for a beaming dad sharing a special day with his daughter. It was very real and legally binding. A great deal might hinge on a marriage: power, land, reputation, and riches, perhaps even war and peace. A daughter's marriageability itself hinged on virginity. Without it, the rest was out of the question. No longer reproductively pristine, her body was no longer of use in the exchanges of the social economy of the elite. Her value became literally whatever her body was worth as utilitarian human clay.

  But what of the women who started out as utilitarian clay—the slaves, serfs, and servants? We might well wonder whether, without the issue of dynastic marriage to make virginity seem so vital, the virginity of these women was still perceived as having value. The answer is a qualified yes. We have little to no direct evidence from these women themselves, but what we do have is a legal paper trail. Rape laws have often drawn distinctions between the rapes of virgin and nonvirgin women, as well as between the rapes of women of high status and women of low status. It is to these laws that we must look to find out how the virginity of low-caste women compared to that of their elite sisters in the eyes of the ancient world.

  What the laws tell us comes as no real surprise. In the ancient world, virginity was considered primarily as a commodity and only secondarily as a metaphysical quality. A Cretan legal code dating from circa 450 B.CE. stated separate penalties for the rapes of virgins versus nonvirgins: the rapist of a female household serf would be fined at two staters if the serf in question had been a virgin, and only one obol, essentially a slap on the wrist, if she had not. These payments, made not to the raped woman but to her owner or master, were clearly token restitution for property damage, not punishment for a personal assault.

  Virginity, then, was a well-known quantity to the ancient world. Depending on whose virginity it was, and where a person lived, losing it (or stealing it) might be a matter of anything from parting with some pocket change to losing one's life. And yet at the same time, we have considerable evidence that at least in some cases, being a virgo (in Latin) or ?L parthenos (in Greek) might not have meant what we now take it to mean: there were virgins who could, and did, have sex.

  Virgins and the Sons of Virgins

  The idea of a virgin with a sex life may appear to be a paradox, but really it is only a problem of language. Neither virgo norparthenos, nor the Hebrew equivalent betulah, in their dictionary meanings, denotes an exclusively sexual status. They could be used to indicate sexual inexperience, but the commonest meaning of either word was roughly equivalent to "girl" or "unmarried female."

  Just as a maiden becomes a wife in English, a Roman virgo became uxor (wife), and later matrona (matron) after bearing children. In Greece one went to one's wedding chamber a parthenos and left it a gyne, a wife, or, more literally translated, a woman. Marriage and its sexual consummation were what socially and linguistically transformed a girl into a woman, a virgin into a wife. German is among the modern languages that retain this linguistic shift. German for "girl" or "young woman" is Madchen; the word for "virgin" in the specifically sexual context is Jungfrau; but the word for "wife" and the word for "woman" are one and the same, Frau. A female of sufficient age can be called eine Frau (a woman), without being married, but to call her Frau So-and-so is to call her someone's wife.

  In the ancient world just as now, a woman's first experience of sex did not necessarily coincide with her wedding night. Although we assume that premarital sex was uncommon for women then, the very existence of laws that penalized it tells us tha
t it did in fact take place. So do accounts of premarital pregnancies discovered and bastards born, which are sufficiently frequent that we know premarital sex was not so very rare as all that. At the same time, though, the terminology used to categorize women's status was firmly bound to the estate of marriage. The inevitable result was that parthenia, the state of being diparthenos, could and sometimes did describe women who were sexually experienced and even some who had borne children.

  This apparent paradox is the nucleus of a fascinating mytho-literary tradition. Clearly it should be impossible for a virgin to give birth, and the Greeks particularly found this contradiction to be symbolically rich and useful. An extraordinary person should, they felt, have extraordinary origins, and in Greek legend they often did: many of Greece's most beloved heroes and heroines, including Helen of Troy, were described as parthenios, the "sons of virgins." In Helen's case, her father Zeus famously seduced her mother, Leda, while he was in the form of a swan. Atalanta's son Parthenopaeus wasparthenios, too, along with fellow Homeric heroes Asclepius (fathered by Apollo), Heracles, and Perseus (both fathered by Zeus). Some parthenios children went on to repeat their mothers' performances: Evadne, daughter of mortal Iphis and immortal Poseidon, was herself the mother of a parthenios son, Iamus, by Apollo. Often these parthenioi have a single mother and two fathers, a divine one who is the child's real father and a human one who marries the woman after the child is born and adopts her child as his own.

  Not, of course, that every real-life parthenios was a hero. Many of them were probably born and abandoned by their desperate mothers to die on the slopes of the Parthenion, the mountain of virgin births reputed to lie on the border between Argolis and Arcadia. But the term for "virgin-born" existed, and so did the precedent of the legends. There is little doubt that at least a few rank-and-file women and their families took advantage of the trope to blame an inconvenient pregnancy on a hieros gamos, a marriage (in this case a euphemism for "bedded by") between a human and a god.

  Claiming that a hieros gamos had occurred seems silly to us today, but in its day it would have represented what we would now call a "harm-reduction strategy." If such a claim were accepted, the status of the woman and her child might remain relatively intact within their community and the mother could even honorably be taken to wife. Who, after all, can do anything about what the gods decide to do? Certainly we can see evidence of all these patterns in the stories told about the most famous parthenios of them all, Jesus of Nazareth. Undeniably heroic, Jesus, too, is presented as having been the dually fathered son of a virgin, his human father having been persuaded to marry his mother by the reassurance that the baby she bore was of divine paternity.

  Sacred Virgins

  Unlike the Virgin Mary, or at least the version of the Virgin Mary that has come down to us today, the average parthenos, betulah, or virgo of the ancient world was literally the girl next door, no holier or more worthy of veneration than any other adolescent. Nor was her virginity anything particularly spectacular. It would end whenever her wedding night arrived, a date which, in the ancient world, was probably destined to be sooner rather than later . . . unless she was one of a small cadre of women who were the exception that proved the rule, the consecrated virgins of antiquity.

  The idea of consecrated virginity is now indissolubly linked in our minds to the Roman Catholic Church, but like many of the Church's other practices, it existed long before the Church. Sacred virgins dedicated to the service of the Divine were just another of the myriad aspects of pre-Christian religions that later found a home under the vast syncretist umbrella of Christian practice. Some pre-Christian sacred virgins, like the Greek Leucippides, female virgins who served Apollo's sisters, were primarily servants of the temples. But save the absence of marriage and children, the life they had in the temples may not have been much different from the life they would have had outside of them. Temples, too, after all, required people to clean, cook, sew clothing, weave cloth, and tend the hearths and gardens. Others, like the well-known vestal virgins of Rome, might be figures of enormous sacred and secular influence, and led lives that were so far outside the normal trajectory as to be of near-mythic proportions.

  Becoming a priestess was not, however, an easy out for those who weren't interested in marrying. A woman couldn't choose that path just because she wanted it. Consecrated virgins were typically handpicked by religious officials and were often drawn from the ranks of the elite. Moreover, consecration as a sacred virgin did not necessarily mean permanent virginity. The term of service rendered by consecrated virgins was usually limited, in some cases beginning in childhood and ending around the time that a girl reached marriageable age. Even the vestals served only thirty years, at which point (though precious few of them exercised the option) they were free to marry if they wished.

  Vestal Virgins

  The tomb, or rather a small underground cell near the Colline Gate, beneath the packed earth of Rome's Campus Sceleratus, was a constant specter in the lives of the vestal virgins. For them, it symbolized not their daily lives, but rather what they could expect should they break their virginal vows. Plutarch describes the punishment of a seduced vestal in chilling detail:

  A Virgin who is seduced is buried alive . . . they prepare a small room, with an entrance from above. In it there is a bed with a cover, a lighted lamp, and some of the basic necessities of life, such as bread, water in a bucket, milk, oil, because they consider it impious to allow a body that is consecrated to the most holy rites to die of starvation. They put the woman who is being punished on a litter, which they cover over from outside and bind down with straps, so that not even her voice can be heard, and they take her through the Forum . . . When the litter is borne to the special place, the attendants unfasten her chains and the chief priest says certain secret prayers and lifts his hands to the gods because he is required to carry out the execution, and he leads the victim out veiled and settles her on the ladder that carries her down to the room. Then he, along with the other priests, turns away. The ladder is removed from the entrance and a great pile of earth is placed over the room to hide it, so that the place is on a level with the rest of the earth. That is how those who abandon their sacred virginity are punished.

  This merciless penalty was not used often (only ten vestals are documented to have been put to death), but it was used. Sometimes the charges made against the vestal in question were legitimate, but many were not. Occasionally, as in 215, when the Emperor Caracalla himself seduced or raped one of three vestals he wished to remove from office (he had her buried alive along with the other two in a gruesome trifecta), the "punishment" of a fallen vestal was in reality nothing more or less than a politically motivated murder.

  None of this would make sense if the vestals had been nothing more than giggling sorority girls who spent their days lounging around the Atrium Vestae. But it makes perfect sense when we realize who and what the vestals really were: the most powerful women in Rome, a fiercely elite and autonomous cadre, privileged at an even higher level than most men. The vestals were guardians of the sacred flame that symbolized the hearth of Rome's patron goddess, Vesta, housekeeper to the Roman pantheon, and were thus nothing less than the protectors of Rome's most important connection to the gods. Consecrated to the goddess, the vestals were almost alone among Roman women in not being required to have male legal guardians. When a vestal finished her thirty years' service, she was well provided for financially by means of an impressive dowry from the imperial treasury, set aside for each vestal when she became a priestess. Those who survived their thirty years' service retired to a wealthy civilian existence of rarely paralleled freedom.

  A vestal's power and autonomy were not merely symbolic, nor were they limited to matters of religion. Vestals enjoyed privileges at the level of magistrates (their personal bodyguards were lictors, normally assigned to judges) and in some cases even at the level of the emperor himself: vestals had the prerogative to pardon any condemned criminal who crossed t
heir paths, provided the meeting was not prearranged. Given that, now as then, executions might be ordered for political reasons, anyone with the power to commute a death sentence held not just the power of life and death but potentially considerably more. Vestals were also the guardians of important military and treasury records, could testify in courts of law without having to take an oath, and were the executors of the emperors' wills. It was quite an extraordinary life for women who, under normal circumstances, would probably never even have been legal persons in their own right. As it has for many other women throughout history, consecrated virginity bought the vestals a great deal.

  If the vestals wielded enormous power, which they did until the adamantly Christian emperor Theodosius abolished the institution in 394, a whopping eighty-one years after the Roman Empire became officially Christian, we should not imagine that they were somehow unfit for the task. On the contrary, these women were to the manor born. When a vestal died or left the temple, the daughters of the Roman elite between the ages of six and ten would be assembled, and twenty of these girls would be chosen as the pool from which the next initiate would be picked. Their bodies had to be completely sound, with no deformities or faults, their hearing and speech perfect, and each girl's parents, whose pedigrees had to be suitably upper-caste, both had to be living. These twenty little girls would be brought before the pon-tifex maximus, Rome's chief priest, who would choose one by lottery, then take her by the hand and recite the formula "I take you, beloved, to be a Vestal priestess."

  As of that moment, she no longer belonged to her family, and could not even inherit property from them: she belonged to Vesta and to Rome. The girl would then be led away and her long hair cut short (shearing the hair is a common symbolic gesture in virginity-consecration and sex-renunciation rituals). The priestess-to-be would be dressed in the white robes and decorated metal headband of her new order, and, no doubt somewhat dazed and grieving the loss of her childhood home and family, she would take the vows that would pledge her to thirty years' virginal service. She was no longer anybody's daughter, but instead the most junior of six women who would be her only family for what would likely be the rest of her life.