Ab urbe condita

Several[*](Affairs in the City.) 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 practised 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.