Fire and Sacrifice
Page 23
The Metellan faction suffered. Licinius Crassus had come to his cousin’s aid in vain. And the affair touched more than the three Vestals. The Pontifex Maximus was Metellus Dalmaticus. Although no charges were levelled against him, the reversal of his verdict and popular resentment aroused against the whole college of pontiffs was a damaging blow. The trials that followed under Cassius’ quaestro extraordinaria were overtly a repudiation of Metellus’ judgement and an attack on his integrity . . .
The magnitude of the sin struck sensitive chords among the superstitious. Fear of desertion by the gods provoked almost mass hysteria and culminated in dreadful sacrifice of four men and women, Greeks and Gauls.
***
Notes from the author
Real characters and imagined
The trial of three Vestal virgins, Aemilia, Marcia and Licinia, in 114 BC is recorded in several sources, though information about this ancient event is scant. Brief mentions by a small number of historians writing around the time or after are occasionally contradictory and sensationalist, and in all cases written by men who would have little understanding of the life of the priestesses. There is little verified detail.
The Vestals’ true guilt or innocence can never be known for sure.
The following are characters who were real people recorded in history, though in most cases we know only their names and occasionally their title and some family history or political connections. Who they truly were as individuals can be only guessed.
Aemilia
Marcia
Licinia
Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus (there is record of a daughter Caecilia and later children though my research has yet to yield any information about a wife, who is here fictionalised)
All mentioned Metelli relatives
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus
Lucius Licinius Crassus (Licinia’s lawyer cousin)
The consul Cato (though my research has yet to yield any information about his wife, who is here fictionalised)
The slave Manius and his master Barrus
The tribune Peducaeus
The Vestals Terentia, Pompeia and Flavia exist only to serve the narrative. There are historical records of many Vestals over the temple’s history of around one thousand years, but it’s not known for sure who made up the full company of priestesses in 114 BC. Likewise Urgulania, Tristan, Cor and Helvi are fictional.
There is also no record of Elian and Secunda/Ember having ever existed.
But there’s nothing to say they didn’t.
The house of the Vestals
Visitors to the Roman Forum can walk through the ruins of the house of the Vestals and the Temple of Vesta today. That house, however, is a much newer, larger model. The Vestals of 114 BC lived in more modest dwelling, built on a different axis. Of this house, archaeological works have thus far only determined a small portion, and a plan of the foundations.
There is no archaeological or written record yet found of the quarters for those who served the second century BC house of Vestals, though there were almost certainly slaves in service. I have taken creative licence in assuming there were stables and at least a small garden for self-sufficiency in those times. As the Palatine Hill rises across the south of the sacred area, the Temple of Castor and Pollux to the west, and the street and Regia lie on the northern side, the precinct for the stables and orchard must have been up the street to the east (in the direction of the Colosseum, though this did not exist at that time). As the much larger house of the later empire stretched into this area, it might be surmised that this space had always belonged to the Vestals.
There is also no record of the source or supplier of the wood and/or coal required to perpetually fuel the sacred fire.
The burial place of the Vestals, the Colline Gate, is marked on several ancient plans of Rome and can be found by visitors to Rome today. It was one of many gates in the ancient city walls. As part of the punishment the exact location of the tombs was, however, never marked. They would most likely lie today under busy roads.
Nabataea and Petra
Fictional Elian’s home, the carved city of Petra in Nabataea, is another real place that you can still walk through today. It is a Wonder of the World, in today’s Jordan.
We know that the Roman world was aware of the Nabataeans at least as early as 312 BC, when Antigonus I Monophthalmos (‘Antigonus the One-Eyed’) led a failed campaign against the nomads.
Nabataea was eventually annexed to Rome around 106 BC, just eight years after the Vestals’ trials.
Around forty-four years after our story, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (by then married to Dalmaticus’s daughter) defeated the Nabataean King Aretas III (87–62 BC) and besieged Petra.
I like to imagine Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, on his triumphant ride through the streets, happening across the sun-darkened face of an old woman that he finds familiar, but cannot quite place.
A final note to the reader
Some things were always secret, held within the deep recesses of the Temple of Vesta, never open to the public. Perhaps the priestesses, in so doing, decided for us that some details don’t matter.
What mattered most to me, in writing this book, is that it’s true there was a time, not so long ago, that deity resided in the everyday. Goddess and god sat among us, not above us nor ever absent, not just in the temples round our cities but in our kitchens, gardens, groves and rivers. The making of bread, the sowing of seed and the collecting of water were all expressions of the sacred. It was a time when the sacred included connection to earth, air, wind and fire.
The Temple of Vesta was clutched by the populace as the embodiment of security: their hearth. But it’s true too that the religion considered inseparable from, and essential to, the world’s greatest commonwealth of the time was replaced within a few hundred years of this story by new ways of thinking, just as religions in empires and times gone before. And, therefore, in possibilities to come.
What stays is that this goddess, among the earliest of all, was a goddess of the elements of nature. ‘For the Earth and Vesta are the same deity,’ as Ovid wrote.
If we are to connect with nature in our modern age, to better honour and protect her, it may help to remember that we are nature, just as Aemilia, a real woman who lived, was of the fire.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Professor Russell T Scott for his generosity of time for an unknown author on the other side of the world. Thanks also to other researchers quoted in the text who were so supportive in granting copyright permissions for this project.
Sincere thanks to my editor Simone Ford for the polish and immense encouragement. Finally, thanks to my wonderful support group and beta readers including the Self Publishing School Mastermind Community, Bruce and Georgina McKenzie, Vanessa Rae, Helen and Neil Ffrench, Therese Buckley, Olive Allen, Jodie Wearne, Olga Walker and my family, most especially the indefatigable Pam Collins and Adam Pynt. My love.
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Thank you for sharing the journey.
Victoria
About the author
Victoria Collins lives and works in Canberra, Australia. She has held a long career in corporate communications and journalistic writing, and has taught diploma students in creative writing, professional writing and public relations for more than six years. She is also author of Fast Effective News Writing for Nonprofits.
Image © Victoria Collins, ruins of the Temple of Vesta, Roman Forum
Image © Victoria Collins, statue of a Vestal, Roman Forum
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