← Back to the map Ruins of the atrium and pool of the House of the Vestals in the Roman Forum

House of the Vestals, Roman Forum · Wikimedia Commons (photo: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0)

House of the Vestals

Atrium Vestae

MonumentItalia · Rome, Italy, Roman ForumBuilt 100 BCE

About

Six women live here, in a colonnaded house of two storeys built around a long courtyard of pools, wedged between the Forum and the Palatine slope. They are the Vestals: taken as children, bound to thirty years of service and to chastity, and answerable to the chief priest of Rome. Their work is to keep the hearth fire of the state alight, and letting it go out is treated as a public emergency. Romans also lodge wills and treaties with them, on the reasoning that nobody would dare rob this house. In 117 CE the building is newly rebuilt, and grander than the one it replaced.

What happened here

It was put up to be argued with. Public monuments carry an inscription at eye height naming who paid, what for, and by whose authority, because being read is the whole return on the investment. People meet at them, give directions by them, and shelter under them. Children climb them. The bronze fittings are stolen often enough that they are re-attached with lead. On anniversaries the base is garlanded and the local council makes a short speech nobody listens to. Monuments also date the town for you: a run of them along one street shows which families were rising in which decade, and which ones stopped. When a family falls out of favour, the name is chiselled out and the stone is quietly reused.

In ancient writing

Ovid, Fasti 6.263-265
Ovid calls the whole complex 'the small place that holds the Atria of Vesta' and says it was once the great palace of unshorn Numa — the legendary king who first built beside the shrine he founded.