Roman Civilization

CMS 206 /History 206

• The Lupercalia (NP) (the "feast of the she-wolf" or "the feast of purification by means of a goat") was celebrated on February 15.
• The Lupercalia was a festival about which both we and the Romans know much and understand little. It was a wildly popular holiday, very old and very rowdy.
• What we know:
  • The holiday was not dedicated to a particular god. Augustan writers speculated it might belong to a number of gods: Faunus (the Roman Pan), Inuus (the "Goer-in") and Augustus, in a fit of reform, decided it was meant to honor the god "Lupercus". In 494, Pope Gelasius I, finally suppressed the feast (you'll see why it wasn't the kind of thing you'd expect the Church to like) and announced hence forth it would be the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Some folks, however, believed that the celebration of St. Valentine's day is a survival of the Lupercalia.
  • The celebration was under the supervision of two colleges of priests (very unusual): the Luperci Quintilii (founded by Romulus) and the Luperci Fabii (founded by Remus).
  • On the 15th, the two colleges of priests met at a cave called the Lupercal at the foot of the Palatine hill. It was here that the she wolf suckled Romulus and Remus after the uncle had ordered them tossed into the Tiber. The cave was preserved until the late republic.
  • The priests sacrificed goats and a dog (very unusual) and cakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins. Then, some of the priests smeared the foreheads of two youths (from society families) with a knife stained with the blood of the goats and dog. Other priests then wiped the blood away with wool that had been soaked in milk. Then the youths laughed uproariously.
  • Then the priests cut the skins of the goats into strips with which the young men (who apparently were buck naked) girded their loins. Then everyone had a wild party [alright, they liked goat meat].
  • After the feast, the priests stripped down and covered their privates in strips of goat skin (reserving one to carry in the hand). They then ran a route through the city striking bystanders with their strips of goat skin. Women, especially newly wed women, liked to get slapped with the goat skin. They thought it would help them have lots of kids and easy births. In general, the Romans thought the running of the Luperci was great good fun and not to be missed.
  • The route the priests ran changed over time, but originally, appears to have been around the Palatine hill (which the Romans believed was one of their earliest settlements and the site of Romulus' hut [which they took care to preserve for centuries].
• What we think it was about:
  • a celebration marking the boundries of the early Roman settlement
  • a ritual reflecting Rome's origins as a community of shepherds
  • a way of propriating the dead (who showed themselves as wolves - the root of the modern notion of "wolf-men")
  • a purification ritual
  • a fertility ritual
  • Based on what you know about the Lupercalia, justify these interpretations.
• During the feast of the Lupercalia in the year 44, Mark Antony, a Luperci, offered a crown to Julius Caesar, saying folks were sick of this dictator nonsense, and why didn't he just declare himself king? Caesar modestly declined the crown, but a lot of Romans thought he had been testing the waters, and some decided, because of this, to kill him one month later. Shakespeare's version of this historical scene is great.
• Romulus himself used the feast of the Lupercalia to cover the movement of his men when he usurped his usurping uncle and gave the throne back to his grandfather.

Shakespeare's version / Plutarch's account in the life of Romulus (section 21 ff.) / Livy's account / Relationship to the modern St. Valentine's day / Background info on Lupercalia from Encyclopaedia Britannica.