Virgin: The Untouched History (16 page)

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
nor
parthenos,
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 that 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 was
parthenios,
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 their 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.

Then the work began. The vestals tended the sacred fire, of course, but they also baked special ritual salt cakes for Vesta and sacrificial cakes for various holidays, fetched water from a sacred spring and carried it back to the Atrium Vestae (the home of the vestals) or to the Aedes Vestae (the temple itself), kept the temple clean, and guarded certain sacrifices. Naturally, they also dealt daily with one another as mentors, mothers, daughters, sisters, and, undoubtedly at times, as in any group of people living in close quarters, as rivals and enemies.