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Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new sum up terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the sum up point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best-selling blends. Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. This is John Batchelor, a Rome of One's Own. This is the new book by Emma Southen,

the subtitled The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire, forgotten no longer.

Here, Emma tells the story of a Vestal Virgin who sacrificed, her name is Opea in 483 BCE, sacrificed by the city of Rome.

Why? Because there's been an omen. Who knows what kind? The river flooded, the river drought,

a plague, a fire. There's been an omen. And what happens to the Vestal Virgins? How do they use the Vestal

Virgins, the centerpiece of the Republic's religious worship? Here Emma explains. It's both bizarre and tribal,

and at the same time reveals what Rome represented when it called itself a civilization,

superstition.

A Rome of one's own, Emma Sauton to explain.

So they effectively sacrifice her to the gods, but without actually sacrificing her. It's necessary. The way they find out that a vestal virgin has lost her virginity and stopped being a virgin, is generally that something terrible will happen and there will be signs and omens from the gods and they need to placate

the gods so they make what is effectively a human sacrifice but without having to get their

own hands dirty because they don't technically like human sacrifice so they hold a funeral for her where they parade her through the city as though she is

already a body.

And then they take her to a cave that has been dug out just inside the walls of Rome.

And they wall her inside that hole in the ground with some milk, some bread and an

oil lamp and they leave her in there to either suffocate or starve to death, which is a very

slow and very horrible way to kill somebody.

Note here.

More of this later.

Hi, I'm Alastair Campbell from The Rest is Politics.

Nish Kumar here from Pod Save the UK.

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