Hostiles linguas inimicaque vinximus ora,
Dicit discedens, ebriaque exit anus.’
In spite of the names of deities we find here, Tacita and Dea Muta[[1384]], and of the pretty story of the mother of the Lares which the poet’s fancy has added to it, it is plain that this is no more than one of a thousand savage spells for counteracting hostile spirits[[1385]]. The picture is interesting, as showing the survival of witchcraft in the civilized Rome of Ovid’s time, and reminds us of the horrible hags in Horace’s fifth epode; but it may be doubted whether it has any real connexion with the Feralia. Doubtless its parallel could be found even in the Italy of today[[1386]].
XV. Kal. Mart. (Feb. 15). NP.
LUPER(CALIA). (CAER. MAFF. FARN. PHILOC. SILV. AND RUSTIC CALENDARS.)
There is hardly another festival in the calendar so interesting and so well known as this. Owing to the singular interest attaching to its celebration in B.C. 44, only a month before Caesar’s death, we are unusually well informed as to its details; but these present great difficulties in interpretation, which the latest research has not altogether overcome[[1387]]. I shall content myself with describing it, and pointing out such explanations of ritual as seem to be fairly well established.
On Feb. 15 the celebrants of this ancient rite met at the cave called the Lupercal, at the foot of the steep south-western corner of the Palatine Hill—the spot where, according to the tradition, the flooded Tiber had deposited the twin children at the foot of the sacred fig-tree[[1388]], and where they were nourished by the she-wolf. The name of the cave is almost without doubt built up from lupus, ‘a wolf’[[1389]]; but we cannot be equally sure whether the name of the festival is derived directly from Lupercal, or on the analogy of Quirinalia, Volcanalia, and others, from Lupercus, the alleged name of the deity concerned in the rites, and also of the celebrants themselves[[1390]]. In any case we are fairly justified in calling this the wolf-festival; the more so as the wolf was the sacred animal of Mars, who was in a special sense the god of the earliest settlers on the Palatine[[1391]].
The first act of the festival seems to have been the sacrifice of goats (we are not told how many), and of a dog[[1392]]; and at the same time were offered sacred cakes made by the Vestals, from the first ears of last year’s harvest. This was the last batch of the mola salsa, some of which had been used at the Vestalia in June, and some on the Ides of September[[1393]].
Next, two youths of high rank, belonging, we may suppose, one to each of the two collegia of Luperci (of which more directly), were brought forward; these had their foreheads smeared with the knife bloody from the slaughter of the victims, and then wiped with wool dipped in milk. As soon as this was done they were obliged to laugh. Then they girt themselves with the skins of the slaughtered goats, and feasted luxuriously[[1394]]; after which they ran round the base of the Palatine Hill, or at least a large part of its circuit, apparently in two companies, one led by each of the two youths. As they ran they struck at all the women who came near them or offered themselves to their blows, with strips of skin cut from the hides of the same victims; which strips, as we have seen, were among the objects which were called by the priests februa.
Here, in what at first sight looks like a grotesque jumble, there are two clearly distinguishable elements; (1) an extremely primitive ritual, probably descended from the pastoral stage of society; (2) a certain co-ordination of this with definite local settlements. The sacrifices, the smearing and wiping, the wearing of the skins, and the striking with the februa, all seem to be survivals from a very early stage of religious conceptions; but the two companies of runners, and their course round the Palatine, which apparently followed the most ancient line of the pomoerium, bring us into touch with the beginning and with the development of urban life. Surviving through the whole Republican period, with a tenacity which the Roman talent for organization alone could give it, the Lupercalia was still further developed for his own purposes by the dictator Caesar, and thenceforward lived on for centuries under his successors into the age of imperial Christianity.