10.23
Several portents occurred this year and,
with the view of averting them, the senate passed a decree that special
intercessions should be offered for two days. The wine and incense were
provided at the public cost, and both men and women attended the religious
functions in great numbers. This time of special observance was rendered
memorable by a quarrel which broke out amongst the matrons in the chapel
of the Patrician Pudicitia, which is in the Forum Boarium, against the round
temple of Hercules. Verginia, the daughter of Aulus Verginius, a patrician,
had married the plebeian consul, L. Volumnius, and the matrons excluded
her from their sacred rites because she had married outside the patriciate.
This led to a brief altercation, which, as the women became excited, soon
blazed up into a storm of passion. Verginia protested with perfect truth that
she entered the temple of Pudicitia as a patrician and a pure woman, the wife
of one man to whom she had been betrothed as a virgin, and she had nothing
to be ashamed of in her husband or in his honourable career and the offices
which he had held. The effect of her high-spirited language was considerably
enhanced by her subsequent action. In the Vicus Longus, where she lived,
she shut off a portion of her house, sufficient to form a moderately sized
chapel, and set up an altar there. She then called the plebeian matrons
together and told them how unjustly she had been treated by the patrician
ladies. "I am dedicating," she said, "this altar to the Plebeian Pudicitia, and I
earnestly exhort you as matrons to show the same spirit of emulation on the
score of chastity that the men of this City display with regard to courage, so
that this altar may, if possible, have the reputation of being honoured with a
holier observance and by purer worshippers than that of the patricians." The
ritual and ceremonial practiced at this altar was almost identical with that at
the older one; no matron was allowed to sacrifice there whose moral
character was not well attested, and who had had more than one husband.
Afterwards it was polluted by the presence of women of every kind, not
matrons only, and finally passed into oblivion. The curule aediles, Cnaeus
and Quintus Ogulnius, brought up several money-lenders for trial this year.
The proportion of their fines which was paid into the treasury was devoted
to various public objects; the wooden thresholds of the Capitol were
replaced by bronze, silver vessels were made for the three tables in the shrine
of Jupiter, and a statue of the god himself, seated in a four-horsed chariot,
was set up on the roof. They also placed near the Ficus Ruminalis a group
representing the Founders of the City as infants being suckled by the
she-wolf. The street leading from the Porta Capena to the temple of Mars
was paved, under their instructions, with stone slabs. Some graziers were
also prosecuted for exceeding the number of cattle allowed them on the
public land, and the plebeian aediles, L. Aelius Paetus and C. Fulvius Curvus,
spent the money derived from their fines on public games and a set of golden
bowls to be placed in the temple of Ceres.