*In fact, wheeled vehicles except for those of the Emperor and the Vestals were forbidden in the city during the daytime.
After that formality had been complied with Brinnaria was permitted to drive where she pleased, with what guest she chose, or accompanied only by her official companion or by her maid. Systematically she drove everywhere, once alone with her maid, once with each of the other Vestals, often with her mother, often with Flexinna. It gave her great pleasure to drive up the long zigzag approach to the Capitol, where no human being save the Vestals and the Empress might be driven, and where few Empresses had ever ventured to drive, to have her carriage halted before the great Temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, where no carriage except the carriages of the Vestals had been seen for more than a hundred years, to enter the temple and say her prayers. It gave her even more pleasure to take her mother or Flexinna with her, as was her privilege; to make them sharers in her right to be driven to Rome’s chief temple, to which all other Romans, even the Emperors, must walk or be carried by litter-bearers.
She discovered another privilege of her position. Roman women of the better classes never went out of doors alone. On the streets a lady, if not companioned by one or more equals, was always accompanied by a maid-servant. This had been the custom from time immemorial and had come to have the force of a moral law. The sight of a woman of wealth and position entirely alone in her carriage would have been startling, to see a lady in her litter without a maid walking behind the bearers would have been shocking: the spectacle of a lady alone on foot would have given scandal.
But, by some survival of the simplicity of the manners in those primitive days in which the order originated, the Vestals were exceptions to this mandatory fashion. A Vestal might never go abroad on foot, except in one of the solemn processions. But, in her litter or her carriage, she might go anywhere in Rome unaccompanied, protected only by her lictor and her bearers or coachman. This privilege, like many others, marked the Vestals as being apart from and exalted above the rest of woman-kind.