“Nobody could form any judgment, at this distance of time, about the guilt or innocence of Oppia or Opimia or Popilia or Porphilia or Orbilia or Orbinia or whatever her real name was, it all happened so long ago. But Minucia and Sextilia and Floronia and the rest were just victims of judicial ferocity, as far as I can make out.”
“You are then of the opinion,” the Emperor asked, “that there never was a guilty Vestal?”
“No,” Brinnaria replied judicially, “I don’t go as far as that. Varonilla was probably depraved and with her the two Oculatas. I don’t think their suicides prove anything against them, for a woman is just as likely to hang herself because she despairs of a fair hearing as because she is conscious of guilt. What weighs with me is that they were brought up in the dissolute times of Messalina and Nero and that their relatives were leaders of the most profligate set in Rome, cronies of Vitellius and his coterie. But although Cornelia was bred and raised in the same social atmosphere, I am quite as sure of her innocence as all the world was the day she was buried and as everybody has been ever since. Domitian just murdered her without a trial, for political reasons and for moral effect. So likewise Marcia and the second Licinia were judicially murdered by that fierce old Cassius Longinus Ravilla. He was elected to convict them, not to try them, and he conducted the trial not to arrive at a fair verdict, but to force a conviction. He had some excuse, for their acquittal on their former trial had been brought about by idiotic bribing and family influence. On the face of the evidence at both trials they were clearly blameless. What ruined them was their trying to shield Aurelia, surely the worst Vestal on record, for she had everything in her favor, ancestry, upbringing and surroundings; she was beyond doubt innately vicious. She was the only Vestal ever justly convicted and justly punished, in my opinion. All the others were irreproachable women, doomed to a frightful fate by prejudiced judges. In general, an accused Vestal is as good as condemned, the whole population so dreads the results of acquitting an unclean priestess. And it is the easiest thing in the world for a Vestal to be accused. Refuse to sell a farm for half its value, snub a bore, order a slave flogged for some unbearable blunder, and the result is the same; false accusation with perjured witnesses and a quick conviction most likely to follow.”
“The subject seems to have occupied your mind a great deal,” Aurelius ruminated.
“Do you wonder?” Brinnaria flamed at him. “What in all the tragic, dramatic history of Rome is half so dramatic or a tenth so tragic as the burial of a Vestal? In all our centuries of ferocity, what seems half so cruel?
“I know that cruelty played no part in the invention of burial alive as a punishment for a convicted Vestal. I know that no caitiff could be found so vile as to dare to lay hands on a Vestal, no ruffian so reckless as to venture to end her life by sword or axe, by strangling or drowning. The most impious miscreant has too much fear of the gods to injure a consecrated priestess. The only way to dispose of a delinquent Vestal is to bury her alive. But the cruelty of it makes me choke. I think of the last hours of each of those who were punished, of their thoughts as the time drew near, of their feelings alone in the dark waiting for death to release them from their sufferings.
“I think of these underground cells as they are now, out there under that awful unkempt, ragged waste lot by the Colline Gate. I think of the skeletons mouldering on the mouldering cots, of the bones, the fragments of crumbling bones, the dust of crumbled bones on the stone floors, as they have been for hundreds of years, as they will be for thousands of years to come. The cot cannot yet have decayed from under what is left of poor Cornelia; her bones must still be entire and in order on the webbing; Aurelia’s bones must be whole yet and Licinia’s and Marcia’s; of Floronia there can hardly be left a trace by now, where Minucia died there can be only an empty stone cell. Do you wonder that the subject haunts me?”
“I do and I do not,” Aurelius replied. “I’ve let you relieve your mind by talking yourself tired. Now listen to me. I think I understand you perfectly. When you came to me before the novel responsibilities of your office had worn on your nerves and you were quivering with dread for fear you might be an unworthy priestess. Now the perils of your situation are wearing on your nerves and you are brooding over the possibility of accusation, trial, conviction and burial alive.
“I sympathize with you. As an Emperor I am exposed to the perpetual danger of assassination. You would be amazed if I detailed to you my various narrow escapes from death at the hands of disappointed seekers after preferment, of incompetent officials, of knaves with grievances of every conceivable and inconceivable variety and of fools with no grievance at all. You would be astonished if I merely reckoned the occasions on which I have just missed being killed. It gets on my nerves, more or less, of course. But I strive to bear up and remain calm and I succeed more or less. I keep before me the fact that as an Emperor I am obnoxious to countless hatreds from fancied slights and to uncountable schemes of revenge. I reflect that the danger is inseparable from the state of my being an Emperor. I try to be philosophical about it.
“So you must attempt to remain placid under the strain of the knowledge that you are exposed to perpetual danger of a horrible death from conviction on false accusation. It is part of the condition of being a Vestal. If anything goes wrong in the way of earthquake, flood, famine, pestilence, conflagrations or defeats, the populace are likely to cry out that some Vestal is unclean and bringing down on the Empire the wrath of the gods. That nothing of the kind has occurred during our recent afflictions has been clearly due to the holiness of Dossonia and Causidiena and to their reputation for strict discipline. But the danger of popular outcry is always real. Then there is the fact that far too large a proportion of our population are dissolute and that, among the dissolute-minded, all Vestals are under suspicion because they are the only women among our nobility who remain unmarried long after they have reached marriageable years. You must learn to take all this as a matter of course and to go sedately about your duties.