The Unwilling Vestal

by Edward Lucas White

Meffia went.

Brinnaria, left alone, did all she could to make the ashes on the Altar look like the remains of a fire that had died out of itself, to efface all signs of her efforts to find live coals under the ashes. She judged that she had succeeded pretty well.

Then she composed herself on the floor and was asleep in ten breaths.

There Manlia found her when the daylight was already strong.

When wakened Brinnaria merely remarked:

“It can’t be helped. I always did sleep too sound.” That day was a gloomy day in Rome. The report was noised abroad that the holy fire had gone out and a chill of horror spread through all classes of the population, from the richest to the poorest.

The Romans were very far from being what they are represented to have been by unsympathetic modern writers on them. Practically all modern writers have been unsympathetic with the Romans, for the Romans were Pagans and all modern writers on them have been more or less Christians, chiefly interested in Pagans because most Pagans were in the later centuries converted to Christianity. With that fact in the foreground of their thoughts and with the utterances of Roman skeptics and dilettantes well in view, most modern writers assert what they sincerely believe, that the Romans had only the vaguest and most lukewarm religious faith, and no vivid devout convictions at all.

The facts were entirely the other way. There were agnostics among the cultured leisure classes, there were unbelievers of various degrees everywhere in the towns and cities. But the mass of the population, not only universally, all over the countryside, but collectively in the urban centers, believed in their gods as implicitly as they believed in heat and cold, birth and death, fire and water, pleasure and pain. Government, from the Roman point of view, was a partnership between the Roman people, as represented by their senate, and the gods. Under the Republic every election had appeared to the Romans who participated in it to be a rite for ascertaining what man would be most pleasing to the gods to fill the position in question. Under the Empire the selection of a new Emperor, whether a confirmation by the senate of the previous Emperor’s accredited heir, or an acclamation by the army of the soldiers’ favorite, appeared to the Romans as the determination of the gods’ preference for a particular individual as their chief partner.

The choice of war or peace, of battle or maneuvering for delay, seemed to the Romans the taking of the advice of the gods, who manifested their injunctions by various signs, by the appearance of the liver, heart, lungs and kidneys of the cattle and sheep sacrificed, by the flight of birds, by the shape of the flames of altar-fires, all regarded as definite answers to explicit questions; who also made suggestions or gave warnings by means of earthquakes, floods, conflagrations, pestilences, eclipses, by the aurora borealis, by any sort of strange happening.

The extinction of the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta was looked upon as a categorical warning that the behavior of the Romans or of some part of them or the conduct of the government was so displeasing to the gods that the Empire would come to a sudden end unless matters were at once corrected. All Romans believed that as implicitly as they believed that food would keep them alive or that steel could kill them.