We must now turn our attention to the last features of the festival; the course taken by the runners round the Palatine Hill, and the whipping of women with the strips of sacred skin. The two youths, having girded on the skins (though otherwise naked) and also cut strips from them, proceeded to run a course which seems almost certainly to have followed that of the pomoerium at the foot of the Palatine. The starting-point was the Lupercal, or a point near it, and Tacitus[[1430]] has described the course of the pomoerium as far as the ‘sacellum Larum forumque Romanum’: in his day it was marked out by stones (‘cippi’). We are concerned with it here only so far as it affects the question whether the running was a lustratio of the Palatine city. The last points mentioned by Tacitus, the ‘sacellum Larum, forumque Romanum[[1431]],’ show plainly that the course was round the Palatine from south-west to north-east, but they do not bring the runners back to the point from which they started, and complete the circle[[1432]]. Varro is, however, quite clear that the running was a lustratio: ‘Lupercis nudis lustratur antiquum oppidum Palatinum gregibus humanis cinctum.’ The passage is obscure, and attempts have been made to amend it; but there can be no doubt that it points to a religious ceremony[[1433]].
This lustratio, then, as we may safely call it, was at the same time a beating of the bounds and a rite of purification and fertilization. Just as the peeled wands of our Oxford bound-beaters on Ascension Day[[1434]] may perhaps have originally had a use parallel to that of the februa, so the parish boundaries correspond to the Roman pomoerium. We have already had examples of processional bound-beating in the rites of the Argei and the Ambarvalia; in all there is the same double object—the combination of a religious with a juristic act; but the Lupercalia stands alone in the quaintness of its ritual, and may probably be the oldest of all.
Before we go on to the februa and their use, mention must be made of a difficulty in regard to the duality of the collegia of Luperci and the runners. These have been supposed to have originated from two gentile priesthoods of the Fabii and Quinctii[[1435]]; and as we know that the gens Fabia had a cult on the Quirinal[[1436]], it is conjectured that the Luperci Fabiani represented the Sabine city, and the Quinctiales the Romans of the Palatine, just as we also find two collegia of Salii, viz. Palatini and Collini[[1437]]. If, however, the running of the Luperci was really a lustratio of the Palatine, we must suppose that the lustratio of the Quirinal city by its own Luperci was given up and merged in that of the older settlement[[1438]]; and such an abandonment of a local rite would be most surprising in Roman antiquity. It is true that there is no other explanation of the existence of the two guilds; but we may hesitate to accept this one, if we have to pay for it by so bold a hypothesis[[1439]].
The last point to be noticed, the whipping with the strips of skin[[1440]], might have attracted little notice as a relic of antiquity in the late Republic but for the famous incident in the life of Caesar, when Antonius was one of the runners. We have it on excellent evidence, not only that the runners struck women who met them with the strips, but that they did so in order to produce fertility[[1441]]. Such an explanation of the object would hardly have been invented, and it tallies closely with some at least of a great number of practices of the kind which have been investigated by Mannhardt[[1442]]. His parallel are not indeed all either complete or convincing; but the collection is valuable for many purposes, and the general result is to show that whipping certain parts of the body with some instrument supposed to possess magic power is efficacious in driving away the powers of evil that interfere with fertilization. Whether the thing beaten be man, woman, image, or human or animal representative of the Vegetation spirit, the object is always more or less directly to quicken or restore the natural powers of reproduction; the notion being that the hostile or hindering spirit was thus driven out, or that the beating actually woke up and energized the power. The latter is perhaps a later idea, rationalized from the earlier. In any case the thongs, as part of the sacrosanct victim, were supposed to possess a special magical power[[1443]]; and the word applied to them, februa, though not meaning strictly instruments of purification in our sense of the word, may be translated cathartic objects, since they had power to free from hostile influences and quicken natural forces. And those who wielded them were regarded in some at least as priests or magicians; they were naked but for the goat-skins, and probably had wreaths on their heads[[1444]]. Their wild and lascivious behaviour as they ran is paralleled in many ceremonies of the kind[[1445]].
It is singular that a festival of a character so rude and rustic should have lived on in the great city for centuries after it had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. This is one of the many results due to the religious enterprise of Augustus, who rebuilt the decayed Lupercal, and set the feast on a new footing[[1446]]. It continued to exist down to the year 494 A.D. when the Pope, Gelasius I, changed the day (Feb. 15) to that of the Purification of the Virgin Mary[[1447]].
xiii Kal. Mart. (Feb. 17). NP.
QUIR[INALIA]. (CAER. MAFF. FARN. PHILOC.)
QUIRINO IN COLLE. (FARN. CAER.)
How the festival of Quirinus came to be placed at this time I cannot explain: we know nothing of it, and cannot assume that it was of an expiatory character, like the Lupercalia preceding it, and the Feralia following. Of the temple ‘in colle’ we also know nothing[[1448]] that can help us. We have already learnt that this day was called ‘stultorum feriae,’ and why; but the conjunction of the last day of the sacra of the curiae with those of Quirinus is probably accidental; we cannot safely assume any connexion through the word ‘curia.’ The name Quirinalia was familiar enough[[1449]]; but it may be that it only survived through the stultorum feriae.
The Roman of the later Republic identified Quirinus with Romulus; Virgil, e. g. in the first Aeneid (292) speaks of ‘Remo cum fratre Quirinus[[1450]].’ We have no clue to the origin of this identification. It may have been suggested by the use of the name Quirites; but neither do we know when or why that name came to signify the Roman people in their civil capacity, and the etymology of these words and their relation to each other still entirely baffles research[[1451]].