The Golden Keeper

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My grandmother once told me that she witnessed the last ritual murder to occur in Rome. A young Vestal who had broken her vows was forced to watch the flogging to death of her lover before she was buried alive.

I was only a child then, living in the high house that has been my family’s since the days of the Republic. Of course, I was curious. A few days later, I walked along Vicus Iugarius to the Forum. But what I found in the corner of the great square where my grandmother claimed to have stood hugging the folds of her nurse’s cloak were sightseers harangued by barking orators as they thronged amid the stalls of moneylenders, flower-vendors and trinket sellers. On that day, even the Temple of the Vestals resembled a building site, with fresh marble decorations being chiseled as a statue to a Head Vestal was prepared for erection.

Still, in my innocence, I pressed my ear to the paving, imagining that I might still hear the Vestal woman’s pleading screams as the newly turned soil filled her mouth above all the passing roar, perhaps even the flack of leather against her lover’s flesh. I only found out many years later that unchaste Vestals were in fact immured within niches of the temple and left with a small supply of bread and water, although that still seems a strange kind of mercy.

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