The Agony of Licinia

Limestone. God, I hate limestone. The dreadful color it reflects across the street and downtown from the museum steps is enough to make you despise it forever. In fact, not even pretty-princess pink defiles my neurons as much as the color of aged limestone. That day, when my class was on a field trip at the Met, I barfed inwardly, feeling no shame in my disgust.

Mr. Mercurio, his long rimmed mustache curling in the fuzzy museum light, kept asking us to come check out the ancient Rome section. Not that we hadn’t learned about it already; we’d been learning it for almost all year now. He simply and kindly wanted us to be introduced to something for which we did not care about, as is the nature of all teachers. I obeyed, as is the nature of all students.

The illuminated exhibits were like great silver spores in the magnificent bronze hall/fungus. Your eyes would flit everywhere at once, trying to process all of the different places you needed to go, things you need to read, statues you need to see… by see I don’t mean just look at. I’d been to enough museums to tell the difference at that point in my academia. To see is to look past the rust, the holes, the stains. To see is to envision the artist, the making and the creating and the crafting and the presenting and the decaying and eroding, to envision it in an older day.

That day, as I walked up to the Ancient Rome exhibit, my eyes/fungi were attracted to the red curtain in the corner, draped around a statue of a pleading young woman. There was a picture of a blazing fire behind the statue, crinkling with old age. Who on Earth was this?

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The setting sun filled the terrifying temple with an amethyst light. Light such as this shines like moonlight on a trout’s shimmering scales. The great expanse of stars stretched entirely in front of my humble eyes, ebbing and flowing with the proclamations of our gods. Vesta, my mother, my queen. Please protect me. Keep me sheltered, safe in the light of your hearth. 

Why am I shackled in the pitch black of the night? Why must our Empire depend on my choices? Why am I alone? Surely you would not do this to me, no, not you. Least of all you. You would not inflict such horrors upon my bare skin, prostrate me to the “glory” of the people. You whose flame burns so bright and pure. 

“Licinia, come. The hearth needs tending.” Muilitha, my elder, stood above me on the cold marble steps of my prison. My horrible, beautiful, lovely, gut-wrenching, disgusting asylum. Why did I love it here? Why, when I could be alive in the willows, tickling my skin with the grooves of the grass and shackled by none? Only Vesta knows.

The smoke of the fire billowed through the courtyard as I prodded it with a silver cane. The kindling set aflame with a vengeance. Soon there was no work left for me to do, none but wait for my fellow Vestals to return from their blessings. Oh, how I dread loneliness! No company naught for the terrible flames in the center. The flames that consume so much of my soul and send it to Pluto. 

Lovely sisters, lovely kin, come back to me. I dread the flames, the reckoning. Come back…

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As the day shortens and the sun begins to hide from the men of our country at war, we are depended on more than ever. There is no rest, no leisure, nothing but prayer and sacrifice. Late into the month Janus, we see the sun but half of the day. No wizards or feats of Socrates may spare the sunlight. The sun is divine, there is no arguing with it or entreating it to return.

Tora, another of my elders, knits in the corner. Every day before prayer, before devout sacrifice of all worldly pleasures, I watch her knit. There is no greater joy than watching a quiet rebellion, even if it is something such as weaving sheep’s cloak onto spindles of tapestry. 

“Licinia, what ails you?” she asked one night, when the sun had dared to show its face in a dramatic exit. Her soft, gray curls shimmered in the moonlight, as if Diana had woven the moon into the very fibers of her being. Tora was serene, never troubled by the monotony of our life, never bored by her vow of chastity. Tora simply was, and she was very happy.

“Avia, I am scared,” I said with a sigh as I looked for the moon blanketed by stars, “I think such sacrilegious thoughts of escape but I do not wish for punishment. I wish to leave… but I cannot.” Tora’s eyes were awake in that instant, popping up to stare deep into the excesses of mine.

“Child, you are home. There is no other place to be. At least not until you fulfill your vow.” I nodded with a shudder, thinking of wasting away in the hellhole of the temple for the next twenty years. The marble of the steps and the blaze of the courtyard all that would keep me and my thoughts company. 

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I am terrified. Vesta, help me, save me, keep me from my death. Why must I be slandered so? Why must the world strive to bury me deep beneath layers of coal and dust until my screams are heard by none? I must steady myself, cool my inflaming wildfire of emotions. Unus, duo. Unus, duo. Unus… Oh, my lady, I cannot. The world is too terrible, too hateful for me to be at peace. No fires can be quenched without the sacrifice of someone, somewhere, and I grieve for those akin to my soul. 

The Vestal High Priest, Testides, came to me that fateful morning with a smolder in his eye, centering on my timid face. I knew not what would come, not what would be forced upon me as was to Atlas. In the pinching cold, with naught but my silver robe to protect me, I was drawn into the chambers.

“Licinia, the flame has gone out.” I gasped with horror as his thin little line of a mouth morphed to form those fateful words. My surprise went unnoticed by him, as he was looking at me now like a jungle cat who had found his prey.

“You were the only one here on that morn,” he said with a puff of his chest, “How do you explain this?” I laughed to myself, thinking it a joke, but I knew it was not. He would never jest about such a thing, such a horrible thing as the extinguished fire. I could practically read his mind through the beady eyes that looked before me… he thought I had lost my purity. There was only one explanation, though overused and over prosecuted. He thought I was no longer a Vestal Virgin.

“No. No, no, no, no, no. You cannot oust me! I am innocent, you know this!” I implored him as I raised my voice. His beady eyes remained unmoving, though.

“Someone must be punished.” he said. He, who spells my doom and casts me into the depths of death, why must I be punished? Vesta, dea, why did you do this to me? Why have I been punished for the plights of others? Why am I alone in my terror? 

“I will not leave the world of the living. You cannot make me.”