Building a coffee business?

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 sumup 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 Batchel, conversation with the author Emma Southon, her new book,

A Rome of One's Own, the forgotten women of the Roman Empire,

the profiles of women through the kingdom, the republic, the empire,

and then the late antiquity when the Christianity

shows up and changes the Roman Empire completely. This episode that Emma narrates is from

the Republic, early Republic, about 5th century BCE, 5th to 6th century BCE.

And it's the deliberate sacrifice, human sacrifice, of a Vestal Virgin named opia.

What's significant here is that opia has done no wrong.

Opia's sacrifices because something bad has happened,

perhaps lost a battle, perhaps there's been a plague, perhaps the flood of the tiber.

And Emma narrates how it is that they decide that opia must die and how she dies.

Emma Southan, the book, A Rome of One's Own,

forgotten women of the Roman Empire,

the death of opia, a Vestal Virgin, 483 BCE.

Much more of this tonight.

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

...