The Lupercalia: When Men Run Naked Through Rome

The cave still exists.

The Lupercal — the cave at the foot of the Palatine Hill where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus — is a real place in Roman geography. Archaeologists in 2007 announced they had located a decorated vault underground near the Palatine that may be the ancient shrine of the Lupercal. Whether or not they found the right cave, the Romans knew exactly where it was and returned to it every February 15th for over a thousand years.

On that morning, two groups of young priests called the Luperci assemble at the cave. One group is the Quintiales, connected to the family of Romulus; the other is the Fabiani, connected to the family of Remus. They sacrifice two goats and a dog. A sword smeared in the sacrificial blood is touched to the foreheads of two young men — one from each priestly college. The blood is immediately wiped away with wool soaked in milk. The young men must laugh as this is done.

Then the goats are skinned.

The priests cut the skins into thongs — februa, from which February takes its name — and strip to their waists (Plutarch says they strip completely). They run through the streets of Rome.

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The run follows a course through the Forum and around the Palatine Hill.

As they run, they strike everyone they pass with the goat-skin thongs. Women, particularly, position themselves to be struck. Roman women believed — and Roman writers record this belief earnestly — that being struck by the februa during the Lupercalia promoted fertility and eased the pain of childbirth. Pregnant women sought the contact. Women who had difficulty conceiving pushed through the crowd to be where the running priests would pass.

Plutarch, who finds this all somewhat extraordinary, records it without mockery. He notes that in his own time (first century CE) the belief about women and fertility was still active. He connects the ritual to the story of the Sabine women, who were told by an oracle that if they let a sacred goat mount them — he is careful with the Latin — they would bear children. He treats the running priests as a ritual memory of this oracle.

Ovid, in the Fasti, is more comfortable with the sexuality implicit in the festival. He connects the Lupercalia to Faunus — the wild Italian woodland god who is identified with the Greek Pan. Faunus, he says, is the fertility force of the land, and February is when the land begins to stir again after winter, and the festival is the human acknowledgment of that stirring.

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The political moment of the Lupercalia is February 44 BCE.

Julius Caesar is watching the festival from the Rostra — the speakers’ platform in the Forum. Mark Antony is running with the Luperci. He is one of the fastest. He runs up to the Rostra with a laurel wreath and a diadem — the symbol of a king — and offers it to Caesar.

Caesar refuses. The crowd cheers.

Antony offers it again. Caesar refuses again. The crowd cheers again.

Three times, and the third time Caesar has the diadem carried to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, with the note that the Roman people, not Caesar, should decide if Rome needs a king. This is either a staged refusal — evidence that Caesar wanted the crown but needed the public to offer it — or a genuine refusal, Caesar demonstrating that he does not want the title even if he effectively has the power.

The conspirators who killed him a month later, on the Ides of March, were not reassured by the refusal.

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The festival continued for five centuries after Rome became Christian.

Christian emperors found Lupercalia difficult to suppress. It was attended by everyone, explicitly sexual in character, connected to fertility beliefs that the Christian church considered paganism, and it kept happening anyway. Emperors occasionally tried to reshape it or redirect its energy. The festival ignored them.

Pope Gelasius I, in 494 CE, finally extinguished it — or replaced it, depending on your interpretation — with the feast of the Purification of the Virgin on February 2nd. He left a terse letter explaining that the Lupercalia’s defenders were welcome to run through the city naked in February if they found it so effective against disease, which they apparently did not take him up on.

The cave on the Palatine fell quiet. The goat-skin thongs were put away. The naked run through the Forum of an empire that no longer existed ended after more than twelve hundred years.

The thing it was celebrating — the return of spring, the fertility of the land, the memory of the wolf and the twins — did not end. It simply stopped having a name.