Special Guest Blogger: Priestess Licinia

The best scapegoats, already tried and tested for many centuries, were us Vestal Virgins who were a group of priestesses responsible for maintaining the sacred fire that burned at the center of the forum in the Temple of Vesta as it was thought  if it went out, or if one of us attendants broke their vow of chastity, bad things would happen.
Being a Vestal Virgin took a decade of training and was an enormous privilege, most women would do anything to be in our sandals. We sit in the best seats at the arena, right beside the Senators ands were at the front and center of countless festivals and events. We were even invited you to the famous bacchanalia parties that most people would die to attend, and often did once they were there.
Hungry for prestige, noble families jostled to have their prepubescent daughters chosen to be one of the exalted six to guard the sacred flame, so my mother was an insufferable bighead the day I was accepted into the College of Vestals  at the precocious age of ten. Over the next decade, I learnt to perform my many duties, before serving as a fully fledged priestess alongside her five colleagues, until my retirement twenty years later.
We enjoyed privileges no other women can enjoy. We were able to buy, sell, rent and inherit property. We could liberate slaves, own land and even testify in court, where most women must stay silent but the price we pay in return was  not love another, remain pure and unsullied and not covet so much as a kiss and to act with grace and humility.
In 95 BC, bad things happened, and so logic followed that one of the Vestals must have been up to no good so in time-honored tradition, i was brought before judges in the Roman basilica, and put on trial accused of allowing the flame to go out while i was playing hide the sausage with Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome.
I had to buy some flowers for the afternoon ritual. Our supplier was sick so I had to fetch them myself and left the sacred flame in the care of a trainee Vestal, a young girl not yet qualified to be on active duty.
I figured she had the sufficient qualifications to stand still and watch a flame for five minutes but she accidentally set fire to her robe while trying to warm her hands at the hearth. As she flapped wildly at her sleeve, she accidentally extinguished the sacred flame, thus endangering all of Rome and all causing the loss of a battle in the Sertorian War.
Crassus was pursuing me to sell him my countryside villa, He’s been pestering me for months, trying to get it at a discounted rate. The man wouldn't take no for an answer and as he has been snapping up property from desperate landowners for years but he wanted mine because it’s got a swimming pool in the shape of Venus’s breasts and because it sits in-between two plots he already owns, so he was probably looking to turn it all into some kind of awful resort or something.
The traditional sentence for breaking the rules was being buried alive in a sealed underground chamber with the customary pitcher of water and snacks. and there we would sit spending our final days in darkness and solitude, thinking about what she has done.
As Crassus had been doggedly pursuing many others and was known as the richest man in Rome with a ruthless reputation of buying houses on the cheap, then rebuilding them with slave labor, i was found not guilty of unchastity and was acquitted.
As for Crassus, he rose to become an enormously powerful general and statesman, funding Julius Caesar’s early career and forming an alliance with him but before his death, after years of relentless nagging, I'd finally had enough and sold my countryside villa to the greedy general.
At the end of my 30 years of service, i retired and although I was free to love, have sex and get married, after what the men had put me through, by the time I was eligible to be with a man, I was put off them altogether.