Lupercalia

Summary

The Lupercalia is a Roman festival held on 15 February, two days after the middle of the month. It begins at the Lupercal cave at the foot of the Palatine, where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. The priests, called Luperci, sacrifice goats and a dog; then two youths of noble birth are brought in, some of the priests touch their foreheads with a bloody knife, others at once wipe the stain off with wool soaked in milk, and the youths must laugh. Then they cut the goatskins into thongs and run through the city naked but for a girdle, striking everyone they meet, and women do not avoid the blows, believing they help conception and ease childbirth.

The Romans traced the festival to a time before Rome. Livy says the Arcadian Evander set it up on the Palatine, a rite in which young men run naked in play in honour of Lycaean Pan, whom the Romans called Inuus, and that robbers ambushed the young men during the festival: Romulus fought them off and Remus was captured. Dionysius says the Arcadians built the shrine of Pan at the direction of Evander's mother Carmenta in a large cave under the hill, overarched by a dense wood, with deep springs flowing from beneath the rocks, and that the Romans called it the Lupercal.

Ovid's Fasti gathers all the festival's explanations. The priests run naked because Pan, god of the herds in Arcadia, loves to run naked on the mountains, and because the first Arcadians lived in the open without clothes. They run naked also because clothes deceived Faunus when he came by night for Omphale and found Hercules in her dress, so he hates clothes that deceive the eye. They run because Romulus and Remus were exercising naked on a day when a she-goat was sacrificed to Faunus, when a herdsman shouted that robbers were driving off the cattle; the brothers ran out naked by two roads, Remus with the Fabii caught the robbers and brought back the plunder, and ate the entrails before Romulus came back with the Quintilii. Then Ovid tells of the she-wolf: the twins were thrown into the flooding Tiber, the basket came to rest by the fig tree, and a she-wolf that had lately whelped suckled them and licked them with her tongue: "the she-wolf gave her name to the place, and the place gave their name to the Luperci". Last comes the story of the women who bore no children in Romulus's reign: they went to the grove of Juno under the Esquiline, the treetops shook, and the goddess said "let the sacred he-goat go in to the matrons of Italy"; an augur from Etruria killed a he-goat and told the women to offer their backs to thongs cut from its hide, and ten months later they gave birth.

The festival lasted into Caesar's time. Plutarch says young nobles and magistrates ran through the city in it, and women of rank stood in their way and held out their hands to be struck, like children at school, hoping for an easy delivery if pregnant and for a child if barren. One year Antony, then consul, was among the runners; he came into the forum carrying a royal diadem wound with laurel and held it out to Caesar, seated on a golden throne; Caesar pushed it away and the people applauded; he offered it again, Caesar refused again, and all applauded.

The idea the festival turns on is that every year it goes back to the beginning of the city's life: the cave with its water, the she-wolf who gave the two babies their first milk, and the blood that was nearly shed. So Butas, as Plutarch reports, says the bloody knife on the youths' foreheads recalls the danger the infants escaped, and the milk recalls their nursing. Then the runners come out of the cave and go round the village striking with the victim's hide, a round that is, as Dionysius says, a purification of the villagers, and a beating that is a prayer for children. The festival joins what the animal did for the children, nursing and keeping them alive, to what people hoped for themselves: to be cleansed and to bear children.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ovid says the place took its name from lupa, the she-wolf, and the priests theirs from the place. The Roman essay in this project reads lupa as labuʾa, lioness, from the root l-b-ʾ, and sets beside it Hebrew lābīʾ and Akkadian labbu, both the lion. The same Arabic root holds something that joins the lion to the festival's story: Lane gives libaʾ, the first milk at the time of bringing forth, labaʾat al-shāt waladahā, the ewe suckled her young one with her biestings, and albaʾa al-jady, he bound the kid to the end of its mother's teat so that it might suck the biestings. So the root names the female beast of prey and the first milk a mother gives her newborn, which is what the she-wolf did at the Lupercal. L is l, Latin p answers Arabic b since Arabic has no p, and the final hamza does not survive in Latin.

Linguistic Root

Lewis and Short derive Lupercus from lupus and arceo, to keep off, with a "perhaps" on the second, the priests being those who keep wolves from the flock. De Vaan says the origin of lupus itself is unclear: deriving it from the Indo-European word for wolf, *wĺkʷo-, "requires two ad hoc assumptions", metathesis in Italic and then the borrowing by Latin of a neighbouring Sabellic form, and he offers instead another root meaning "marten". So the reading covers lup- alone; -al and -ālia are the place and festival endings, and -erc- has no sure explanation.

The essay grades the reading "probable" and makes the root that of a nursing female beast of prey. Hebrew lābīʾ is lion and lioness, with ləbiyyā for the mother lioness in Ezekiel 19:2, and in the Akkadian epic Erra says "on earth I am a labbu", a lion. What the Arabic dictionary adds is that the same root names the first milk a mother gives her newborn: libaʾ is "the first milk at the time of bringing forth, before it becomes thin", labaʾat al-shāt waladahā, the ewe suckled her young with it, iltabaʾa, the young one sucked its mother, and in the report of the birth of al-Ḥasan son of ʿAlī, albaʾahu bi-rīqihi, he poured his saliva into his mouth "as the first milk is poured into the mouth of an infant". The she-wolf at the Lupercal was not only a beast of prey but, as Ovid says, a female that had lately whelped, so that her milk was the first milk, and she gave it to the babies. The limit of the reading is that Arabic labuʾa is a lioness and Latin lupa a she-wolf: the kind is the same, the species differs, as species shift between the branches of the tongue in other names.

Key Mythic Narratives

Festival and purification

Plutarch says the festival seems to be one of purification, since it falls on the ill-omened days of February, a month whose name can be taken to mean purification, and the festival day itself was once called Febrata. He says its name answers to the Greek Lycaea, the feast of wolves, so that it would be old and have come with the Arcadians. He gives reasons for the dog's sacrifice: either the dog is a fit victim for purification, as the Greeks carry out puppies in their purifying rites, or it is the wolf's enemy.

The two companies of runners

The Luperci were two companies, the Fabiani and the Quintiliani, to which a third named after Julius Caesar was later added; at first they were herdsmen, and later young men of the highest rank joined them. In Ovid's story Remus wins with the Fabii, and Romulus comes back with the Quintilii to find only bones.

Remus on the festival day

Dionysius reports from Aelius Tubero that Numitor's herdsmen knew the young men would celebrate the feast of Pan, and lay in wait in a narrow part of the road as they came out of the Lupercal after the sacrifice to run round the village naked, girt with the skins of the victims; they were in three bands, and the herdsmen fell on the first, which had Remus in it, and took him.

Symbolic Reading

The Roman rereading essay gives three explanations of the nursing she-wolf: that lupa was also a Roman word for a prostitute, so that she would be a woman from the margins of society who raised abandoned children, which Plutarch says of Acca Larentia, the herdsman's wife; that the wolf was the totem of the founding tribe; or that the she-wolf is the wild country that sheltered the founders before it became a city. The festival supports the third: the priests come out of a cave in the wild under the hill, wear skins and go round the village once a year, so that the wild enters the city for a day and leaves again.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

A cave with water and a nursing mother is a sacred place in more than one land. In Amazigh Ifri is the cave, and the Amazigh essay in this project makes it the dwelling of spirits and ancestors. The Lupercal is a cave of this kind: Rome's founders grew up there, and the priests come out of it every year. The difference is that Ifri is a place people go to, while the Lupercal is the place of a single event that the festival repeats.

The Roman Faunus is the Arcadian Pan in the Romans' own account: Ovid says Evander brought his woodland gods from Arcadia and the Romans worship the god on that ground, and Livy says the Romans called Lycaean Pan Inuus. The festival joins the divine twins to the exposed child nursed by an animal, as Zeus is fed on the milk of Amalthea in the cave of Dicte on Crete.

In the North the blood of the victims is sprinkled on the people themselves at the blót with twigs like sprinklers, after the altars and the temple walls inside and out are reddened with it, so that the blood becomes a mark on the bodies of those present as it does on the two youths' foreheads at the Lupercalia; see blót.