I INTRODUCTION
The story of Tarpeia has been at least alluded to, if not explicitly examined, in an abundance of scholarship since the 1990s. Much of this scholarship assumes that Tarpeia's status was that of a Vestal virgin and that it was her priesthood that made the Tarpeian rock particularly suitable for traitors:Footnote 1 as scholarship on women and religion has suggested, the Vestals’ physical bodies symbolised the safety of the Roman state,Footnote 2 hence Tarpeia's breached body metonymised the Sabine attack on Rome. Because the Vestals were protectors of Rome, their treason was particularly egregious and therefore worthy of being monumentalised in myth. Thus, whether one believes that the Tarpeia myth was an early one that later explained the Tarpeian rock, or whether the Tarpeian rock required an aetiology that was supplied by Tarpeia, the identity and affiliation of Tarpeia plays an important role.
In the following pages, I put forward two arguments. The first two sections challenge the scholarly trend of reading Propertius’ Vestal Tarpeia as the standard or ‘canonical’ version of this myth.Footnote 3 I argue that Tarpeia's status as a Vestal virgin was an option, rather than required, and has been unduly stressed in modern scholarship as a means of understanding what Tarpeia ‘meant’ to Rome or to Roman authors. In fact, Vestal status is absent from the majority of our texts and its presence therefore invites discussion. Building upon that insight, I then interrogate the possible rationales for the identification of Tarpeia as a Vestal in Varro's De lingua Latina. My second argument derives from this analysis. It attempts to recontextualise Tarpeia outside of the Propertian narrative, and in particular in Varro. While the fragmentary status of De lingua Latina on the one hand, and the almost entire loss of the Antiquitates on the other, make certainty impossible, the surviving remains of Varro suggest that he has called Tarpeia a Vestal both to emphasise her non-Roman status and because of the Vestals’ association with the pignora imperii.
II THE MYTH OF TARPEIA
The story of Tarpeia is popular, appearing in almost every author who handles early Roman history,Footnote 4 but it is also full of variants.Footnote 5 Dionysius and Plutarch in particular preserve information of considerable importance, which they attribute to authors of the Hellenistic and republican eras. Despite the variation, the Tarpeia story preserves a coherent plot: during a war, Tarpeia opens the gate to the Capitoline, allowing the enemy into the citadel. As a result, she is buried in a pile of shields and dies. This series of events appears in all authors, and the burial under shields is the subject of imagery on coins and relief sculpture. The manner of death in particular, therefore, provided the means for identifying the story as Tarpeia's. The remaining details are subject to authorial choice, and the story provided fertile ground for moralising about female agency.
The most common divergence found in ancient narratives centres on Tarpeia's motives for opening the citadel to the Sabines: a strand of the tradition going back to Fabius Pictor claimed that she betrayed the citadel for gold, while Propertius depicted her as lovestruck; Calpurnius Piso claimed that she attempted to double-cross the Sabines and there was even a version in which she clearly protected Rome.Footnote 6 Other differences included her ethnicityFootnote 7 (Sabine or Roman), her statusFootnote 8 (public priestess or private citizen) and periodisationFootnote 9 (Sabine war or Gallic war). The majority of these variants are represented by a small number of ancient texts; only Plutarch, for example, includes the option of Sabine ethnicity. Yet modern scholarship on Tarpeia has not seriously questioned her priesthood, despite the fact that she is explicitly called a Vestal in only two accounts: Varro and the early fourth-century c.e. Breviarium Vindobonense.Footnote 10
The large number of variants suggests that we cannot generalise about the myth as a whole from its narrative in a single author, since no single version can claim authority as the ‘original’ or ‘primary’ account. Each author begins from the idea of the girl who opens the gate and fits the event to his particular concerns, adjusting the moral, motive, chronology and characters as appropriate. This complexity has been recognised recently by Tara Welch,Footnote 11 but her analysis in fact starts from Livy's version and takes it as normative: her opening narrative relates Livy's version and refers to the Propertian evidence as a ‘shocking variant’.Footnote 12 This language implies that Livy's version is the standard against which other accounts should be measured, rather than one of the many ways in which the story of Tarpeia could be told.
Welch is not alone in collapsing the accounts of Tarpeia into a single narrative. Dennis Pausch, for example, summarises Livy's account as follows: ‘the betrayal of one of two strongholds of the Roman city, the Arx Capitolina, by Tarpeia, the young daughter of its commander. She had fallen in love with Titus Tatius, the Sabine king.’Footnote 13 This is in fact not what Livy says; it is an amalgamation of Livy and Propertius. Indeed, much modern scholarship that deals with Tarpeia begins from one of these two authors, with particular reliance upon the outlier, Propertius.Footnote 14 Modern emphasis on Livy's and Propertius’ accounts diminishes the myth's complexity.
Livy's account is compressed but offers four distinct options for understanding Tarpeia's treachery; all centre on greed (introduced by ‘corrupted by gold’) and Sabine treachery (‘a trick’).Footnote 15 The basic plot of Propertius’ narrative sets a lovelorn Tarpeia in opposition to chastity. She falls in love at first sight with Titus Tatius as she is getting water and rationalises her betrayal of the city in a lengthy monologue.Footnote 16 Her long speech has attracted significant attention, particularly as a dramatisation of incestum. Much scholarship on Tarpeia begins from this contrast between Vestal virginity and amor to create an aetiology for treason based in Rome's earliest history.Footnote 17
There is substantially more interest in Tarpeia as a Vestal from the vantage point of scholarship on Propertius 4.4 than there is in scholarship on the Vestals.Footnote 18 By assuming that the Vestal version of the Tarpeia story was an important part of her myth from the beginning, critics can incorporate scholarship on Vestals alongside the evidence on Tarpeia, assimilating the Propertian account to numerous Greek parallels about women who betray cities for love.Footnote 19 Yet focus on Propertius’ evidence has over-emphasised Tarpeia as a model for Vestal incestum, which creates problems for understanding other versions of her story. Tarpeia's Vestal role sits uncomfortably with the characteristic events of her myth that I identified above. Scholars who believe that Tarpeia must be a Vestal are forced to concede that she does not, in fact, fit the picture of the Vestal order in many respects: for example, the presence of a Vestal in Romulean Rome is anachronistic, an issue that I discuss in more detail below.Footnote 20 Decentring Propertius’ evidence offers more options for understanding this story: other accounts are not centred on incestum or even Vestals at all.
Although part of the dissonance in the picture of Tarpeia as a Vestal may be related to our lack of understanding of the Vestal college or indeed to changes affecting the Vestal order over time, some aspects of Tarpeia's story — in particular, the circumstances surrounding her death — explicitly differ from our evidence concerning Vestals. A more capacious view of Tarpeia, focusing on other concerns than those of elegiac poetry, complements other stories about Rome's development and openness to outsiders.Footnote 21 It is therefore helpful to consider both the ways in which scholars conceive of Tarpeia's connection to the Vestals and why those conceptions are problematic.
III TARPEIA THE VESTAL: STATE OF THE QUESTION
The intersection of Tarpeia's treason with her role as a Vestal has been understood primarily as a means of intensification: her treason is worse because she is a Vestal, since Vestals were expected to protect Rome. This argument has been made most recently by Meghan DiLuzio in her study of female religious personnel in the Roman Republic. Building on Holt Parker's analysis of Vestal bodies as symbols of the permeability of Roman walls, DiLuzio suggests that the story ‘reveal[s] a deep fear of invasion or even annihilation as a result of unchastity’.Footnote 22 This line of thinking, which is representative of recent scholarship on Tarpeia, is worth analysing in greater detail, because it makes a number of assumptions about what the story is meant to signify.
The first assumption follows Parker and others in their arguments that the primary religious function of the Vestals was to be physical embodiments of Rome.Footnote 23 Vestal chastity, in this view, aimed to protect the city from outsiders — a role akin to our modern notion of border security. Vestal incestum thus functioned as a breach of that safety. Parker argues that an unchaste Vestal is a prodigium who was sacrificed for the health of the Roman state.Footnote 24 In an argument rich with Christian overtones,Footnote 25 Parker both conflates and separates the various crimes of Vestals.Footnote 26 His hypothesis is that incestum must be voluntary rather than simply physical; thus the lovestruck virgin Tarpeia is a model for incestum, while the Vestal Rhea Silvia, the mother of Rome's founder, neither is unchaste nor is she punished.Footnote 27 This argument is at odds with the ancient evidence on Rhea, with important ramifications for Tarpeia and incestum.
The mother of Romulus and Remus is described as a Vestal in Cicero, who attributes the information to Ennius; the same information also appeared in Fabius Pictor.Footnote 28 The Vestal mother of the founder thus appears to belong to the oldest written traditions about the city. By the late Republic, Rhea Silvia provided an essential link to the mythical Roman metropolis of Alba Longa.Footnote 29 Because many prominent families, among them the Iulii,Footnote 30 claimed that they too had migrated from Alba Longa, Alban myth was a topic with wide-reaching ramifications. Rhea's pregnancy has been interpreted by some scholars as a felix culpa — a religious error that turns out well for Rome.Footnote 31 This language, however, is absent from ancient authors. Instead, the Vestal Rhea Silvia's pregnancy may be seen as the first in a series of miraculous events that culminates in the foundation of Rome: later examples include the twins’ survival from drowning in the Tiber and their rescue by a wolf.Footnote 32 The twins were thus marked as divine, but this did not necessarily help their mother. As an Alban Vestal, Rhea was punished differently from the Roman Vestals, but she was punished. Our earliest information suggests that she was thrown into the Tiber,Footnote 33 like the hermaphrodites and parricides from whom scholars have tried to disentangle Vestals.Footnote 34 Moreover, it seems that Fabius Pictor said that she was imprisoned when her pregnancy was discovered,Footnote 35 although her later fate is less clear. She disappears from Livy's narrative and survives to the twins’ adulthood in Dionysius;Footnote 36 however, she marries the Anio in Ovid's Amores and perhaps in the Fasti, which supports the idea that she had been drowned as a punishment.Footnote 37 Regardless of the means, ancient authors seem certain that she was punished for her rape, whether by imprisonment or by death.Footnote 38 Her punishment indicates that incestum is not necessarily voluntary.
The behaviour required of a Vestal was not limited to physical virginity. The two Vestals Postumia and Minucia, for example, were accused ‘on account of a more attractive appearance than was right’ (‘propter mundiorem iusto cultum’).Footnote 39 Although Postumia was acquitted, Minucia was not; her condemnation suggests that incestum goes beyond the sexual.Footnote 40 The difference in treatment between Postumia and Minucia undermines the argument that Vestal chastity symbolised the physically intact borders of the state,Footnote 41 but may support a separate hypothesis, that the unchaste Vestal was a scapegoat for crises in Rome.Footnote 42
Despite these problems, Parker's model of incestum has offered a clear line of interpretation for Tarpeia. Because Propertius relates her breach of a physical boundary (the gate of the Capitoline citadel) to her love for an enemy invader, scholars have been eager to read the details of Propertius’ story into other accounts of Tarpeia.Footnote 43 It is notable that most works on the Vestals omit Tarpeia or mention her only hesitantly, while scholarship on Propertius has endeavoured to explain the Vestal status of the puella Tarpeia in 4.4.Footnote 44
Because specialists on the Vestals are not interested in Tarpeia, arguments that focus on the Vestal Tarpeia tend to centre on the Vestal functions that are most similar to the character we see in Propertius 4.4: most importantly, chastity (redefined as lack of amor, rather than physical virginity) and the ritual use of water.Footnote 45 In doing so, however, these arguments elide the substantial disagreements regarding Vestals among specialists in Roman religion. Robin Wildfang, for example, has suggested that the Vestals protected the Roman food supply, rather than its physical boundaries; Ariadne Staples has argued that the Vestals, because they lacked legal families, represented the entire Roman community.Footnote 46 These roles, however, have no parallel in Propertius and are never discussed in analyses of the Vestal Tarpeia. This decision on the part of modern critics reduces the complexity of the Vestals; moreover, it limits our understanding of Propertius’ poem by restricting discussion to the permeability of the physical boundary of Rome. Similarly, because Propertian scholarship in general is interested in questions of gender, the Propertian Tarpeia has been examined as a locus of gender confusion.Footnote 47 Yet the connection of the Vestals to gender ambiguity relies on a retracted hypothesis. In 1980, Mary Beard suggested that the Vestals had aspects of virgins and matronae and possibly also men; revisiting this argument in 1995, she stated that the evidence could not support their masculine status.Footnote 48 Rather, she maintains, the Vestals occupied a unique but female role in that they retained characteristics of (unmarried) daughters and of wives. Their feminine status has been reiterated by more recent scholarship.Footnote 49
The previous paragraphs demonstrate that we can only make sense of Tarpeia's story as an aetiology of Vestal incestum by understanding the role of the Vestals in a very specific way: that their virginity was a metaphorical safeguard of Rome. Yet even if the argument that the Vestals were the embodiments of public safety holds, this idea that the Vestal body is a symbolic manifestation of either the state's security or the body politic is problematic when applied to Tarpeia. She does not fit the criteria for incestum, even in the narratives when she is in love; she does not sexually act on her feelings and thus no man is punished alongside her. Her desire for gold bracelets is similar to the cases of Postumia and Minucia — but those examples, as we saw above, were equivocal, with only one of the two Vestals being condemned. Therefore, it stands to reason that the desire for gold is, in itself, not enough to assimilate Tarpeia to a Vestal or to convict her of incestum — except in Propertius. In the following paragraphs, I list some of the conceptual difficulties and incoherences of Propertius’ account.
The first difficulty lies in the applicability of incestum. As previous analyses of Vestal incestum have shown, there were two requirements for the punishment of an unchaste Vestal: first, a demonstrable lapse in duty, such as the extinction of the Vestal fire or a plague; and second, a demonstrable lapse in behaviour on the part of one of more Vestals.Footnote 50 The miraculous salvation of select Vestals, such as Tuccia,Footnote 51 indicates that either lapse on its own was not enough to secure condemnation. Tarpeia's story in fact demonstrates the opposite of what we would expect from a story of incestum. In the case of incestum, disaster comes first: the disaster or prodigy is a warning from the gods that the Vestal's body has been breached.Footnote 52 This divine warning triggers a search for the unchaste Vestal. But there is no disaster to warn the Romans of Tarpeia's treachery. In fact, the treachery itself is the disaster: it is only at the moment of her death that Rome is harmed by the breach of the Capitoline.
The second difficulty comes with Tarpeia's death. Unlike the punishment of an unchaste Vestal, the death of Tarpeia does not repair the damage done by her treason. Tatius enters the citadel and continues to hold it after he has killed Tarpeia.Footnote 53 The harm to Rome is only ameliorated later, when Romulus vows a temple to Jupiter Stator. Tarpeia's death is exactly the opposite of the standard narrative about unchaste Vestals.Footnote 54 If Tarpeia's physical body represents the city's safety, the city should remain safe: her unpenetrated death ought to protect the citadel, rather than act as an indication of its fall. This inversion of the expected narrative should make us suspicious about the exemplary quality of Tarpeia's Vestal status.
Lastly, a Vestal Tarpeia poses problems for Titus Tatius’ role in the narrative. On the one hand, as the judge of Tarpeia's actions and the person who initiates her murder, Tatius is similar to the pontifex maximus. This role is unlikely for a foreigner. The alternative is no better: to condemn Tatius for violating Tarpeia's sacrosanctity by killing her. This religious error would be true even in the case of an unchaste Vestal, since our authors are careful to point out that the participants in the Vestal's execution do not touch her or even see her as she descends into her tomb.Footnote 55 Although Tatius does not touch Tarpeia as he throws his shield on her, he is far more involved in her death than any of the Romans involved in a Vestal funeral. Yet Tatius’ actions are described approvingly by ancient authors, which does not suggest sacrilege.
These inconsistencies suggest that Tarpeia's Vestal status was not a required piece of her story. Rather, it was one possible option that ancient authors could use to express an important feature of her treason. In order to identify that feature and the likely reason for choosing the Vestal option, it is necessary to agree on the ancient authors who depict Tarpeia as a Vestal. As indicated above, the majority of scholarship takes Vestal status as a given in Tarpeia's story. In the next section, I will argue that there are in fact only a small number of authors who definitely conceive of Tarpeia as a Vestal.
IV ACCOUNTS OF THE VESTAL TARPEIA
The first evidence for Tarpeia as a Vestal comes from Varro's aetiology of the Tarpeian rock. Varro's narrative is one of the earliest to survive, which complicates any argument about the absolute (rather than relative) primacy of his evidence: while Varro may have been the first to call Tarpeia a Vestal, this may also be an accident of transmission. Yet there are a number of reasons for thinking that the Vestal version of Tarpeia's tale was not the popular version. First, it does not seem to have been widely followed, as I will argue below. Moreover, as tradition made Vestals come to Rome under Numa, a Romulean Vestal Tarpeia is anachronistic.Footnote 56 The only known parallel, Rhea Silvia, is not Roman; she is an Alban Vestal.Footnote 57 The difference is significant. Alba Longa was Rome's metropolis and the presence of an important religious office there early in Rome's history reinforces the significance of the continuing rites on the Alban Mount.Footnote 58 While silence is of course not conclusive proof, it is notable that the authors who discuss Numa's introduction of the Vestals (such as Livy and Dionysius) omit the detail of Tarpeia's Vestal status, while authors who are only interested in Tarpeia (such as Propertius) include the anachronism. And finally, for the reasons I discussed above, much of the information that we do have about the Vestals, and particularly about incestum, does not apply to Tarpeia.
The statement that Livy omits reference to Tarpeia's priesthood needs more explanation, as it has been argued that his account hides a reference to the Vestals.Footnote 59 Livy's account is short and he at no point names Tarpeia; instead he calls her Tarpeius’ virgin daughter (‘filiam uirginem’).Footnote 60 Arguments in favour of Tarpeia as a Vestal depend on the word uirgo as shorthand for uirgo uestalis. Livy's account can then be made to harmonise with Propertius’ account, yielding a common, Hellenising myth: the betrayal of a city for love.Footnote 61 This argument is tenuous, however; Livy's phrasing is probably not a reference to the Vestal version of the story. Although Henry Sanders argued more than a century ago that uirgo alone could indicate Vestal virgins, his evidence is contentious; only two examples, both Ciceronian, stand up to scrutiny.Footnote 62 Elsewhere, the word uirgo in itself is not indicative of priestly status, but of sexual or age status; for example, Livy calls the foreign Sabine women uirgines in 1.9 and 1.12, and it would be absurd to argue on the basis of this language that the Sabine women were all Vestal virgins.Footnote 63 Nor is this an isolated example.Footnote 64 The language used to describe Vestals in Livy's first pentad is consistent: non-priestly virgins are uirgines, while Vestals are Vestales, a linguistic differentiation that includes mythological Vestals like Rhea Silvia. The presence of a uirgo in a context that suggests a Vestal virgin should invite further scrutiny. Livy's use of uirgo for Tarpeia does not stand up to that scrutiny, suggesting that Livy does not depict Tarpeia as a Vestal; rather than referring to a specific religious role, Livy is identifying Tarpeia's age and life-stage.
Surviving Greek authors also differentiate between Vestal and non-Vestal virgins. Dionysius, for example, refers to Tarpeia as a θυγάτηρ and a παρθένος, but not as a ἙστιάςFootnote 65 or a ἱερὰ παρθένος,Footnote 66 terms used to describe Vestal virgins in Greek. Because Dionysius discusses various republican accounts of Tarpeia at length, his evidence suggests that Fabius Pictor, Calpurnius Piso and other early historiographers did not say that Tarpeia was a Vestal virgin.Footnote 67
In addition to language, the fact that Tarpeia leaves the citadel to fetch water has been used to suggest that Livy considered Tarpeia a Vestal.Footnote 68 This activity is parallelled by some accounts of Rhea SilviaFootnote 69 and seems to have been part of Vestal activity historically.Footnote 70 But Livy's account of Rhea does not include her fetching water, nor does this appear in his other accounts of Vestal duties.Footnote 71 Moreover, supplying water for the household was a common female task in antiquity, both in Rome and elsewhere, and remains common in some cultures to the present day;Footnote 72 it cannot be taken as a conclusive identifying feature of a single cult and its personnel.
The final point that has been offered in support of the Vestal version is Tarpeia's death. Tarpeia was buried alive, as all accounts agree; unchaste Vestals, too, were buried alive.Footnote 73 But closer analysis reveals that the modes of death and burial are not particularly similar. Historical Vestals were not buried under piles of shields, as Tarpeia was. By all accounts, Tarpeia's death was quick and violent: she was crushed before an audience of Sabine soldiers.Footnote 74 In contrast, the Vestal was left to suffocate unseen.Footnote 75
The visibility of Tarpeia's death is emphasised in iconography. Her death is depicted on three surviving artefacts: two coins, one republican and one Augustan, and a panel of the Basilica Aemilia frieze.Footnote 76 On the Basilica Aemilia frieze, the helmeted figure to the far left (variously identified as Mars, Romulus or Titus TatiusFootnote 77) explicitly watches as his soldiers throw their shields on Tarpeia, and the soldiers’ sight lines also centre on her. Tarpeia herself looks directly out at the viewer. Unlike an unchaste Vestal, her face is not hidden or veiled, and her falling dress reveals one of her breasts. Even accounting for her obvious distress, she is not depicted as a Vestal; she is missing the infula and uittae that identify Vestals in Roman iconography.Footnote 78 In the absence of these visual signals of Vestal status, a viewer would not be able to identify the woman on the frieze as a Vestal.Footnote 79
The two coins likewise lack these visual cues. They depict Tarpeia's hair as unbound and streaming, a far cry from the elaborate seni crines of the Vestal. On the republican coin, Tarpeia is the object of her executioners’ gaze, as on the Basilica Aemilia frieze.Footnote 80 The Augustan coin, which may be modelled on the Basilica Aemilia depiction, shows Tarpeia looking directly out of the frame at the viewer. While Tarpeia's dress is more modest on the coins than on the frieze, she is still visible as she dies; the coins seem to celebrate her demise. Taken together, the three depictions of Tarpeia suggest that her death was meant to be viewed, unlike the secretive murder of an unchaste Vestal.
Other differences, perhaps less profound, nonetheless reiterate that Tarpeia's death was dissimilar to the Vestals’ execution. The locations are different: Tarpeia was buried on the Capitoline, while unchaste Vestals were buried near the Porta Collina.Footnote 81 And finally, Vestals were killed for incestum, which, as I argued above, cannot be mapped on to Tarpeia's crime. Tarpeia was killed for making a bargain with Titus Tatius and for opening a gate to allow enemies into the city. The accounts of historical Vestals indicate that meeting a man, in itself, was not incestum: Plutarch, in his Life of Crassus, relates that the Vestal Licinia was accused of incestum and acquitted when it was revealed that she was meeting with her cousin Crassus about her property.Footnote 82 The reasons for the meeting and the person met mattered: treason, not sex, was the primary cause of Tarpeia's murder. Burial while still living, yet through different means, for different reasons and in different places, does not offer a particularly compelling parallel. It is all the more important, therefore, to consider why Varro calls Tarpeia a Vestal.
V TARPEIA IN VARRO
Varro engaged in significant research and it is not possible to argue that he invented the Vestal version of Tarpeia's story. But he did substantially influence accounts of early Roman history via (for example) his inquiry into Trojan ancestry and his determination that Rome was founded in (our) 753. It is likely, moreover, that Propertius followed Varro's usage in his account of Tarpeia,Footnote 83 and it may not be going too far to say that Varro brought the Vestal version to prominence. Although there has been significant discussion of Propertius’ reasons for including the Vestal Tarpeia, Varro's rationale remains largely unexplored.Footnote 84 Yet Varro, as far as we know, was providing an unusual detail. In this section, I contextualise Varro's description of Tarpeia within both De lingua Latina and the late republican intellectual environment with the goal of identifying places in the narrative that were open to a Vestal re-interpretation.
In this section of the De lingua Latina, Varro circles through Rome's topography explaining the names of various landmarks. The reference to Tarpeia appears in a longer discussion of the Capitoline hill:
The Capitoline is so called because a human head is said to have been found there when the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter were being dug. This hill previously was called ‘Tarpeian’ from the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia, who was killed there by Sabine weapons and buried. A memorial to her name is preserved, because even now the cliff face is called the ‘Tarpeian rock’. Tradition has it that the hill was previously called ‘Saturnian’ and from it Latium was called the ‘Saturnian land’, as Ennius too calls it. It is written that an ancient town, Saturnia, was on it. Three remnants of it still remain today: the shrine of Saturn at the entry [to the hill]; the ‘Saturnian’ gate, which Junius recalls being there, that they now call ‘Pandana’; and, in the laws about building, back walls for private citizens behind the shrine of Saturn are called ‘Saturnian’.
Capitolinum dictum, quod hic, cum fundamenta foderentur aedis Iouis, caput humanum dicitur inuentum. Hic mons ante Tarpeius dictus a uirgine Vestale Tarpeia, quae ibi ab Sabinis necata armis et sepulta: cuius nominis monimentum relictum, quod etiam nunc eius rupes Tarpeium appellatur saxum. Hunc antea montem Saturnium appellatum prodiderunt et ab eo Lati<um> Saturniam terram, ut etiam Ennius appellat. Antiquum oppidum in hoc fuisse Saturnia<m> scribitur. Eius uestigia etiam nunc manent tria, quod Saturni fanum in faucibus, quod Saturnia Porta quam Iunius scribit ibi, quam nunc uocant Pandanam, quod post aedem Saturni in aedificiorum legibus priuatis parietes postici ‘muri <Saturnii>’ sunt scripti.Footnote 85
Varro refers to the ‘Vestal Tarpeia’ casually and without argument,Footnote 86 and modern scholars have assumed that he was trying to refer to Tarpeia as an unchaste Vestal. In doing so, they follow Propertius’ lead, rather than allowing Varro's evidence to speak for itself.Footnote 87 We should not assume that the version Propertius made memorable is the version Varro told. Indeed, as Steven Green suggests, there is substantial reason to believe that Varro's version was different, since ‘it is clear that Propertius sets out to make his Tarpeia as treacherous as possible’ by adding the Parilia setting to the Vestal Tarpeia.Footnote 88 It is necessary to examine Varro in context to determine what message he is likely to be promoting.
Perhaps surprisingly, given Varro's status as the most renowned intellectual of his day, his evidence for Tarpeia has been mostly overlooked.Footnote 89 Lucienne Deschamps argued that Varro was the source of Propertius’ account of Tarpeia in 4.4, but her aim was to analyse Varro's influence, not his motivations.Footnote 90 More recently, Carolyn MacDonald has argued that Propertius and Varro both attempted to reconstruct a multivalent Roman history from the variety of aetiologies available in the Roman landscape.Footnote 91
Tara Welch has offered the most systematic attempt to analyse Varro's account of Tarpeia to date. She approaches the evidence via Varro's linguistic theory of words formed by analogy and words formed by anomaly.Footnote 92 This analysis leads to the conclusion that Tarpeia is an anomalousFootnote 93 figure due to the formation of her name. From this conclusion, she argues that Tarpeia's confused gender status as a Vestal highlights and normalises the confusion of the late Republic.Footnote 94 The gender-fluid depiction of Tarpeia may make sense of the Propertian evidence, but it is less obviously relevant to Varro: what does Vestal status add to his conception of the story that a uirgo would not? According to Welch, Varro's interest in gender is signalled by the appearance of the adjective tarpeius in all three grammatical genders (referring to the Mons Tarpeius, Saxum Tarpeium and Tarpeia herself).Footnote 95 But in a book dealing with the Latin language, these references indicate not the fluidity of Tarpeia, but of Latin and thus of Rome itself.Footnote 96
As recent work by Diana Spencer has demonstrated, the heart of Varro's project is the inscription of Roman identity through language, including the ‘destabilizing’ effect of words.Footnote 97 Varro offers a series of aetiologies that are grounded in Roman history and its built environment. Although some of these explanations, such as the discussion of the Aventine and Velabrum,Footnote 98 do engage in etymological speculation, Varro makes no real attempt at a linguistic discussion of Tarpeia.Footnote 99 Rather, his discussion of Tarpeia is part of a larger-scale explanation of the aetiologies of Rome's hills. Some of these aetiologies, like the Capitoline's, present changes over time; for others, like the Aventine (which follows it), Varro suggests competing explanations. In discussing the Capitoline, Varro begins with the current name of the hill, which goes back to the sixth-century foundation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. He then adds that previously (between Romulus and Tarquin, in the eighth and seventh centuries) it was called Tarpeian and before that (that is, before Rome was founded) it was called the Saturnian hill. These aetiologies introduce Varro's identification of Rome as the city of seven hills.Footnote 100
Varro's explanation of the Capitoline's names proceeds in reverse chronological order and it is clear from his account that later names replace earlier names only in part. This ‘palimpsestic’ approach to landscape is typical of Varro's description of the city and recalls Roman techniques for memorisation.Footnote 101 Just as Tarpeia's name remains present in the form of the Tarpeian rock, Saturn's name leaves three traces in the Roman landscape: a shrine, the Porta Saturnia and the concept of ‘Saturnian’ walls.Footnote 102 No one is erased from the Capitoline's history; Tarpeia is not unique in this regard.Footnote 103 Rather, she is integrated into a process of historical change that preceded her and will continue after her death.
As Spencer has demonstrated, Varro perceived Rome through dual lenses. The city was at once the rural/pastoral homeland of Romulus and the urban metropolis that began with ‘la grande Roma dei Tarquini’.Footnote 104 His exploration of the Capitol navigates that change without abandoning the earlier referents. Saturn represents the pre-urban phase of the city as a wholly rural deity;Footnote 105 the Capitoline temple shows the city at its urban height. Tarpeia mediates between these two eras, a role which is particularly appropriate for a Vestal. The Vestals, as modern scholarship has suggested, could represent the community of citizens, regardless of censorial status; they were, ideally, freed from familial ties; their role embraced the full spectrum of femininity, from uirgo to matrona. If these arguments about the role of the Vestals as representatives of all aspects of Roman society are correct, a Vestal Tarpeia bridges the rural past of Roman culture and identity with its urban present.
As the fragmentary republican historians preserved in Dionysius and Plutarch make clear, Varro had several options for the aetiology of the Tarpeian rock. He does not always shy away from discussing variant accounts; in the aetiology of the Lacus Curtius several chapters later, he retells three different versions in full.Footnote 106 Perhaps he did not want to spend time describing a name that was no longer in current use. But possibly we have overlooked his contribution: that the hill was named after Tarpeia, not a Tarpeius. Both possibilities appear in a lemma in Festus:
They say that the Tarpeian rock is that part of the hill which got its name because the girl Tarpeia was buried there — the one who made an agreement to betray that hill to the Sabines. Or because a certain Lucius Tarpeius, when he opposed King Romulus over the stolen women, was killed by a hideous punishment in that area where the rock is. Therefore they did not want that gloomy place associated with the rest of the Capitoline.
<Sa>xum Tarpeium appell<atam aiunt partem mon>tis qui ob sepultam Ta<rpeiam ibi uirginem, quae> eum montem Sabinis pro<dere pacta erat, ita> nominatus est. Vel a<b eo, quod, quidam nomine> L. Tarpeius Romulo <regi cum propter rap>tas uirgines aduersa<retur, in ea parte, qua sa>xum est, de noxio poena <sumpta est. Quapropter> noluerunt funestum locum <cum altera parte> Capitoli coniungi.Footnote 107
Festus offers the explanation of Tarpeius as an alternative to the naming of the Tarpeian rock after Tarpeia. We are fortunate to have a republican source for the Tarpeius aetiology, which suggests that it may have been an option available to Varro: according to Plutarch, it is at least as old as the historian Sulpicius Galba.Footnote 108 The context of the two aetiologies is similar: both explanations date back to Romulus and in particular to the Sabine wars; both explain the rock with reference to a horrible death. Because aetiologies deriving from a man are more typical of Roman historiography, the female Tarpeia requires further explanation.
In a variant that is generally considered obscure, Calpurnius Piso states that the Capitoline possesses a monument to Tarpeia.Footnote 109 This monument was not the Tarpeian rock, as Dionysius’ account suggests: ‘for there where she fell she was honoured with a tomb set on the most sacred hill of the city and the Romans make liquid sacrifices each year — I repeat what Piso writes’ (τάφου τε γὰρ ἔνθα ἔπεσεν ἠξίωται τὸν ἱερώτατον τῆς πόλεως κατέχουσα λόφον, καὶ χοὰς αὐτῇ Ῥωμαῖοι καθ’ ἕκαστον ἐνιαυτὸν ἐπιτελοῦσι, (λέγω δὲ ἃ Πείσων γράφει)).Footnote 110 Unlike Varro (and later Festus), Dionysius does not associate the story of Tarpeia with the Tarpeian rock. In this respect, it is notable that neither Livy nor Plutarch make the aetiological connection, either; Plutarch, at least, cites Varro immediately before the story of Tarpeia and Dionysius does the same soon after.Footnote 111
If we can trust Dionysius’ summary of what Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus wrote, they may not have included the naming of the Tarpeian rock, either; rather, as Dionysius argues, the traitor would not be honoured by having her memory perpetuated in a monument. He supports his preference for Piso's version with the explanation ‘if she had died betraying her country to the enemy … in time [the Romans] would have dug up any part of her body that was left and thrown it away to inspire fear and ward off anyone who would act similarly’ (εἰ προδιδοῦσα τὴν πατρίδα τοῖς πολεμίοις ἀπέθανεν … εἴ τι λείψανον αὐτῆς ἦν τοῦ σώματος ἀνασκαφὲν ἔξω ῥιφῆναι σὺν χρόνῳ φόβου τε καὶ ἀποτροπῆς ἕνεκα τῶν μελλόντων τὰ ὅμοια δρᾶν).Footnote 112 While this opinion may not fairly represent what Fabius and Cincius wrote, it suggests that their version did not include a monumentum to Tarpeian treachery.Footnote 113 Tarpeia as eponym makes more sense in the context of an honour.
There are no surviving traces of this memorial to Tarpeia on the Capitoline. Yet Pier Luigi Tucci has uncovered evidence that the Capitoline was substantially restored in the mid-first century b.c.e., when Varro was writing.Footnote 114 Not only did these restorations affect the areas surrounding the Tarpeian rock; they may have affected loci of Tarpeia's memory elsewhere on the hill. Tucci has argued that the shrine of Tarpeia, mentioned by Piso in the passage quoted above, may have been decommissioned during these renovations. If we follow Tucci's argument, we can hypothesise that Varro's ambiguity about Tarpeia's role on the Capitoline may have been in dialogue with these renovations that were transforming the city. Returning to Spencer's analysis of aetiology as a form of civic activity, we can see a statement about the centre of Rome's empire in the choice of the female eponym Tarpeia.Footnote 115 This argument, while it does not replace the Greek parallels for Tarpeia that have been the topic of discussion for more than a century, does invite a Roman perspective.Footnote 116 Varro's reference to Tarpeia as a priestess supports the renovated landscape: instead of forgetting a cult that has been displaced, he offers a renewed significance. His version relates the story to the new appearance of the city. In the final section, I suggest several possible avenues for understanding this changed context in the mid-first century b.c.e.
VI TARPEIA BECOMES A VESTAL
Once we remove the requirement of Vestal status, Tarpeia's relationship with the Capitoline becomes more open to exploration as an authorial decision. In this final section, I offer two speculative attempts to account for the information that we find in Varro without relying on the incestum narrative from Propertius. My suggestions extrapolate from the republican-era variant of Piso and a fragment of the Hellenistic historian Antigonos (preserved in Plutarch), among others, in order to maximise the possibilities that would have been available to Varro. My goal in this section is not to assert that these speculative reconstructions offer us a ‘better’ or ‘more original’ Tarpeia story. Rather, I offer possible ways to understand Varro's assertion of Vestal status.
Varro's decision to make Tarpeia a Vestal is surprising because he also claims that Vesta was a Sabine, rather than a Roman, goddess.Footnote 117 This information is repeated by Plutarch, who does not note an inconsistency.Footnote 118 Hence, a reader of De lingua Latina would be confronted with a Roman woman serving a Sabine goddess and subsequently betraying Rome to the Sabines. This situation benefits the Sabines on both counts, which fits Varro's pro-Sabine outlook but makes little narrative sense.Footnote 119 This Sabine Vesta is, moreover, brought to Rome by Tatius, so a Vestal confronting Tatius is confusingly anachronistic. While it is possible that Varro contradicted himself and Plutarch either did not notice or did not call attention to the discrepancy, both hypotheses are made less probable by the proximity of these two statements. Instead, this apparent contradiction may better be explained by turning to what Varro does not say: he never claims that Tarpeia is Roman.
A group of authors, referenced by Plutarch, told a variant in which Tarpeia was Sabine.Footnote 120 After relating the version of the story that Livy prefers, in which Tatius kills Tarpeia in disgust over her treachery, Plutarch mentions variants that he has read and rejected.
Some tell different stories about Tarpeia. Those who say that she was the daughter of Tatius the Sabine king who was forced to live with Romulus, and moreover that she did and suffered such deeds because of her father, are not credible. Antigonos is one of them.
Τῶν δ᾽ ἄλλα περὶ Ταρπηίας λεγόντων ἀπίθανοι μέν εἰσιν οἱ Τατίου θυγατέρα τοῦ ἡγεμόνος τῶν Σαβίνων οὖσαν αὐτήν, Ῥωμύλῳ δὲ βίᾳ συνοικοῦσαν, ἱστοροῦντες ταῦτα ποιῆσαι καὶ παθεῖν ὑπὸ τοῦ πατρός: ὧν καὶ Ἀντίγονός ἐστι.Footnote 121
In this account, Plutarch seems to imply that Tarpeia was one of the raped Sabine women. Rather than betraying her own city, she remained loyal to her Sabine family and betrayed her Roman captors.Footnote 122 Tarpeia as a captive fits the narrative logic of the Sabine wars, since one rationale for the rape of the Sabine women is Rome's lack of potential brides.Footnote 123 The coin of L. Titurius Sabinus, discussed above, may support the idea that Tarpeia, like Titus Tatius, was Sabine. Aside from Tarpeia, the coins include figures who can be associated with Sabine identity: Titus Tatius, the Sabine women and Saturn.Footnote 124 Propertius, too, may allude to a version in which Tarpeia was Sabine. In her monologue, Tarpeia expresses a wish to become ‘a captive beside your Penates’ (‘ad uestros … captiua Penates’).Footnote 125 Propertius here has a Roman woman wish to be a Sabine captive, an inversion of the Sabine women story in general. The irony would be stronger, however, if the death of a Sabine captive Tarpeia were widely recognised.
A Roman Vestal was sacrosanct; her death could only be accomplished naturally or through the method of burial while alive discussed above. To kill her otherwise is to commit a gross breach of religious piety. Yet this breach is exactly what Titus Tatius would accomplish in killing Tarpeia the Roman Vestal. According to Fabius, he deceives her; according to Livy's first explanation, he is simply brutal.Footnote 126 These depictions of Tatius are unlikely to have been Varro's. As Deschamps has argued, Varro depicted Rome's Sabine rulers carefully.Footnote 127 Titus Tatius and Numa were idealised in Varro's conception, and in particular, the Sabine kings were ideally pius — exactly the sort of ruler who would not kill a sacrosanct priestess without observing the appropriate rituals. If Tarpeia were not a Roman Vestal, but a Vestal of different ethnic origin,Footnote 128 her death would not have required the same rituals as we see in Rome: as noted above, Rhea Silvia, an Alban Vestal, was punished differently for incestum than Roman Vestals. Once Varro had depicted Tarpeia as a Vestal, her Sabine identity would have preserved Tatius’ status as a good king; the different penalty would then be comprehensible. The broad outline of her story would also follow that of Rhea Silvia's: the Vestal Rhea Silvia is raped by Mars, punished but ultimately remembered; a Vestal Tarpeia, one of the raped Sabine women rather than a traitor, is also punished and memorialised in the Tarpeian rock.
A Sabine identity for Tarpeia is not the only option; it is also possible that she, like Rhea Silvia, could have been understood as an Alban. According to Dionysius, Alban and Etruscan reinforcements came to help Romulus in the Sabine war.Footnote 129 Although Dionysius puts the Romans on the Esquiline and the Etruscans on the Quirinal, he does not say who was guarding the Capitoline. The Albans are likewise left unaccounted for. Dionysius may have taken these details from his sources, who make clear that Tarpeia is on the Romans’ side, but not that she is herself Roman.Footnote 130 Dionysius’ information in this chapter is not attributed, but in the story of Romulus more generally he cites Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus extensively and other early annalists (Cato the Elder, Aelius Tubero, Calpurnius Piso) less so. Romulus’ Etruscan allies appear in other accounts, including Varro.Footnote 131 Therefore, Varro may have known about Alban allies; there is no reason to believe that Dionysius invented them.
If Varro considered Tarpeia an Alban, he would have a clear rationale for identifying her as a Vestal: she would join Rhea Silvia as a non-Roman Vestal whose role emphasises the importance of the cult to Rome.Footnote 132 Rome is founded by a Vestal's son and the cults on the Capitoline are guarded by a Vestal during their first war — the only war fought on Roman soil before the priestesses became permanent under Numa. As discussed above, Alban identity had contemporary relevance.Footnote 133 Pierre Grimal has argued that Propertius’ Tarpeia, caught between the Sabines and Rome, offered a metaphor for Caesar's identity;Footnote 134 this would be equally, if not more, relevant to Varro. Perhaps more importantly, Varro was interested in religion and may have had access to information about the Vestals of other cities that we do not.
Alban Vestals did exist, although it is not clear whether they persisted from archaic Latium or were a relatively recent ‘rediscovery’.Footnote 135 Epigraphic evidence tells us that the cult was in operation by the Principate, but it is not clear that the women were active in Varro's day.Footnote 136 According to Asconius’ commentary on Cicero, the uirgines Albanae gave critical evidence at Milo's trial de ui in 52 b.c.e.Footnote 137 Maria Grazia Granino Cecere has cited this passage as evidence that the Alban Vestals were active in the late Republic, but, as discussed above, uirgo alone does not necessarily indicate uirgo Vestalis. Footnote 138 Because the age of the Alban Vesta cult is not known, Varro's engagement with it is difficult to assess. If the cult had continuously functioned since the archaic period, an Alban Tarpeia could function similarly to the Alban Rhea Silvia, providing a continuous relationship between Rome and Vesta and between Rome and its metropolis from Romulus to the first century. Because Varro suggests that hearths are at the heart of a city, this long-standing Vestal connection may have been attractive to him.Footnote 139 Yet a later revival is equally plausible; Augustus’ interest in religious revival is well known and he also took an interest in the cults of Bovillae-Alba Longa.Footnote 140 It is possible that increasing interest in archaic cults, at least in part due to the antiquarian activity of late republican scholars like Varro, encouraged a revival of this priesthood. Such a revival in itself could demonstrate the interest in and importance of these pre-Roman connections to Alba.
Rome's connection to Alba went beyond the Alban Vestals and Romulus’ parentage. The annual festival on the Alban Mount was a required event for Roman magistrates.Footnote 141 Surviving texts make it clear that local Vestals participated in these rites, as did the Roman consuls; Pliny says that there were parallel rites on the Capitoline.Footnote 142 This parallelism of Capitoline and Alban Mount is significant for understanding Tarpeia: just as there were Vestals on the Alban Mount, there is a Vestal on the Capitoline.Footnote 143 Moreover, an Alban Tarpeia creates an unbroken chain from Rhea, continuing to the instantiation of the Vestals from Alba by Numa to Alba's ultimate conquest and destruction by Tullus Hostilius. This continuity emphasises the eternity of Roman institutions at a time when the city was undergoing significant change.
Interest in Alba was particularly relevant because of its connection to the Iulii; Caesar capitalised on this connection in the final years of his life, when Varro was writing De lingua Latina. Footnote 144 Although a connection to Alba is never stated in Varro's text, if the Alban Vestals were either prominent or being revived between the years 52 and 44 b.c.e., the statement of Tarpeia's Vestal status would have had immediate political and cultural relevance. The Iulii claimed dominance over the Alban cults at Bovillae.Footnote 145 If one of those cult personnel were present in Romulus’ Rome, it could have an immediate impact on Caesar's claim to be a new Romulus:Footnote 146 the contribution of the Iulii is clear from the foundation, but Tarpeia's treasonous behaviour does not promote the family's image. Varro's phrasing is carefully neutral, however, and his account of the death of Tarpeia could be understood as rightful punishment (as in Fabius Pictor) or heroic self-sacrifice (as in Piso); his brief account does not pass judgement on whether Tarpeia benefited Rome and hence offers studied ambiguity on Caesar. In the context of a later religious revival, Cicero's much-quoted praise of Varro — ‘that we could at last recognise who and where we were’ (‘ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere’)Footnote 147 — reminds us of the influence of Varro's work on later antiquarian efforts.
Returning to Varro's entry on the Capitoline, one further reason that an Alban Vestal in Romulean Rome might be necessary appears: to guard the pignora imperii. At the beginning of Varro's aetiology, we see that the contemporary name of the hill was given by the discovery of a caput. In Livy's version of the discovery, the head was interpreted by various seers as signalling that the Capitol would become the centre of the world (‘it meant that [the Capitoline] would be the defender of [Rome's] rule and centre of affairs’Footnote 148). This theme is echoed by other accounts of the head, although they all postdate Varro. In other words, the caput is one of the pignora imperii.Footnote 149 Since one of the stated duties of the Vestals was to care for these signs of empire, this may have provided the link for Varro: the hill was the source of one of the signs, so it needed to have a Vestal to guard it as soon as it became part of the city.Footnote 150 Admittedly this suggestion is speculative; Varro in his surviving works does not discuss the duties of Vestals or even mention the pignora. The earliest surviving attestation of the pledges as a group comes from Livy,Footnote 151 although Cicero associates a singular pignus (the Palladium) with Vesta.Footnote 152 But it may be more relevant that immediately before he talks about the Capitol, Varro discusses the etymology of the word praedia, using pignus to explain the concept of pledge;Footnote 153 the word could have reminded him of the head on the Capitol. As Spencer has argued, these apparently weak links are in fact structurally key to Varro's project;Footnote 154 they help inscribe Varro as a guide to a turbulent and changing Rome.
There is further evidence in favour of an Alban origin for Tarpeia in Alexandre Grandazzi's work on Alba Longa. Grandazzi has argued that one of the roles of Alba in Roman myth was to explain the unification of Latin cities. Among the rites on the Alban Mount, he suggests, was a human sacrifice.Footnote 155 However, the examples he cites (Mettius Fufetius, Turnus Herdonius) make it clear that mythological examples of the rites were not sacrifice as we understand it, but what Celia Schultz has termed ‘ritual murder’.Footnote 156 Both of Grandazzi's examples involve horrifying deaths due to treason, involve multiple peoples (that is, not only Romans) and are connected to important early cults of Rome: the fetiales for Fufetius and Diana for Herdonius. A Latin author, whether Varro or an earlier writer, may have noticed the similarity — that Tarpeia also was ritually murdered in a situation involving treason and a mix of Romans and non-Romans and that her death brought about the unification of Rome and Cures — and decided that Tarpeia made the most sense in the context of these Alba-related deaths. As the most prominent unmarried female religious personnel in Rome, the Vestals offered the best parallel to the other priests and in the time of Romulus would have come to Rome from Alba.
VII CONCLUSIONS
Accounts of Tarpeia are comprehensible without assuming that she was a Vestal. This suggests that the Vestal detail was not an integral part of her legend. Instead, her Vestal status was one option for telling this story and the detail could be introduced if it furthered the author's goals for his work. The identification of Tarpeia as a Vestal in Livy, Dionysius and Plutarch, as well as in minor accounts, should be questioned; rather than taken as a given, Tarpeia's Vestal status must add something to the narrative. Because the major accounts, with the exception of Propertius, do not appreciably change with the identification of Tarpeia as a Vestal, they most likely do not depict Tarpeia as a Vestal.
Varro does explicitly call Tarpeia a Vestal and this statement is worth further investigation. Whether the Vestal alternative existed before Varro or was Varro's original contribution cannot be determined from the evidence. The limited information in Varro regarding Tarpeia and the Sabines, however, does not suggest that Varro thought Tarpeia was a Roman Vestal who was sacrilegiously murdered by Titus Tatius; another explanation for his identification of Tarpeia as a Vestal killed by the Sabines is needed. Attempts at explaining his information must engage in speculation due to the limited source material. Yet this material is perhaps less scarce than previous scholarship on Tarpeia would suggest. Dionysius’ and Plutarch's more detailed explications of Roman myth in general suggest alternative accounts of Tarpeia, many of which differ from surviving Latin-language narratives.
I have put forward two suggestions, both of which derive from material that would have been available to Varro. The first suggestion is that Varro responded to a tradition that made Tarpeia one of the Sabine women and used her Vestal status to explain why, in Roman authors, she was killed by the Sabines. As a Sabine Vestal, her death need not have been accomplished in the Roman manner and in particular the prohibition on viewing Vestal punishment would not necessarily apply. This suggestion preserves Sabine pietas, which is called into question when Tarpeia is a Roman Vestal. As we know from other passages of Varro, his Sabine origin was important to him and he was interested in the role played by Titus Tatius.Footnote 157 The second suggestion is that Tarpeia could have been conceived of as an Alban, rather than a Roman, priestess and that this change in ethnicity likewise negates the sacrilege of her death at Tatius’ hands. As we see from the death of Rhea Silvia, Alban Vestals obeyed different rules than Roman Vestals and did not face the same ritualised death ceremony. The increased attention on the family lore of the Iulii in the first century b.c.e. would have made an Alban origin particularly topical and the association of both Alba and the Capitoline with the pignora imperii makes an Alban parallel attractive. Neither suggestion is without difficulties,Footnote 158 but both options allow Varro to anchor the Vestals in the heart of Roman topography and culture before the priesthood was formally introduced to Rome.
It is less probable that Varro viewed Tarpeia as a Vestal in love, an innovation that should instead be assigned to Propertius. In prose accounts, her death was due to other causes: greed, sympathy with the other side or the desire to help Rome. Following the lead of these authors, scholarship on Vestals identifies Tarpeia as an unchaste Vestal only cautiously, if at all. Reassigning the story of Tarpeia's amor to Propertius enriches our understanding of his inventiveness: if, as I have argued, Varro did not think Tarpeia was Roman, Propertius’ Roman Tarpeia in love ratchets the stakes of her story even higher. It may even be the case that Tarpeia's monologue, which envisions a unification of Sabines and Latins, mocks earlier accounts which depicted the Tarpeia episode as a step towards integration — with Rome, of course, coming out on top. A Propertian allusion to the Sabine Tarpeia story of Antigonos is consonant with his treatment of Greek mythology in earlier books.Footnote 159
In this article, I have argued for decoupling the Vestal element from the rest of Tarpeia's narrative. This separation has significance not only for Varro, but also for the remaining authors who retell the story of Tarpeia. The idea that Tarpeia can only be a model for Vestal incestum cannot be sustained. If her Vestal status is an option rather than required, we must consider why any author chooses to include or exclude this status in his account — and thus to consider what Vestals meant to Rome, especially in its infancy. In regard to Varro specifically, my analysis paves the way for further investigation: I have suggested that Varro saw Tarpeia as non-Roman and that this understanding of Vestals fits well into the intellectual context of the first century b.c.e. Previous scholarship has emphasised the importance of local ethnicity to the political life of the late Republic; Varro's influences ranged from his Sabine roots to the Julian emphasis on Alba Longa. Making Tarpeia a Vestal, and particularly a non-Roman Vestal, offers Varro the chance to establish a clear lineage of the cult, from Alban Rhea to Tarpeia to the Roman Vestals established by the Sabine Numa. The presence of a Vestal, whose religious duties were crucial to many Roman rites, is intellectually satisfying: it explains how Romulus was able to establish the earliest Roman cults.Footnote 160 And lastly, the persistently archaic cult of the Vestals provides a continuous link between Rome's past and its future, a link that was as relevant to Romulus in his new city as it was to the renovated Rome of Caesar.
