Philological Dissertation on Honored, Learned, Adored, and Fruitful Virginity

A little later he says that this woman is untouched by men. We will record the entire passage below. He asserts that the same thing happened later in Egyptian Thebes and Patara.

In Athens there was a temple in which there was a house of Virgins. For Strabo says in book 9: Upon the rock is the temple of Athena, and the ancient shrine of the Polias, in which is the unquenchable lamp; and the Parthenon which Ictinus built. Which the interpreter of the Basel edition translates: Upon which rock arises the ancient temple of Minerva Polias, in which is the lamp of unextinguished light, and the house of the Virgins, which Ictinus built.

To these must be added the Salian Virgins, concerning whom Onuphrius has this from Sextus Pompeius in his Roman City. Cincius says the Salian Virgins were hired; they joined the Salii priests of Mars wearing the paludamentum military cloak with peaked caps, whom Aelius wrote with his pen to be performing a sacrifice in the Regia King's House with the Pontiff, wearing the paludamentum and peaked caps in the manner of the Salii. I. Argolus reports this passage somewhat differently in his work on Onuphrius, book 2 on the Circus Games: The Salian Virgins, etc., who were applied to the Salii, etc., whom he wrote with his pen, etc., with the Pontiff, wearing the paludamentum in the manner of the Salii. Martianus Capella, whose words I shall refer to below, says that no sacrifice was ever completed without a Virgin. Few have noted this. Nor does it escape me that in certain sacrifices the herald used to exclaim: Let a Virgin be present original: "Virgo exesto". But was this because a Virgin was unworthy of the mystery, or because the mystery was unworthy of a Virgin?

Finally, the Virgin Iphigenia, removed by the pity of the divine power, as Servius says in the 2nd book of the Aeneid, became a priestess of Diana Dictyna.