The Legend of the Lupercalia Festival

At a Glance

• Central figures: Faunus, the wild god of the Palatine woods; Romulus and Remus, nursed by the she-wolf in the Lupercal cave; the Luperci, the priests who ran the festival rite each February.
• Setting: Rome’s Palatine Hill and the Lupercal cave at its base, from the city’s mythic infancy through the historical Republic; drawn from Ovid’s Fasti, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, and Varro’s antiquarian notes.
• The turn: Each year on the fifteenth of February, the Luperci slaughtered goats and a dog in the Lupercal cave, smeared blood on the foreheads of two young men, then cut the goatskins into strips and ran nearly naked through the streets, striking anyone they could reach.
• The outcome: Women who were struck - or who stepped forward to be struck - were believed to receive the god’s blessing of fertility, and the city itself was considered purified against plague and barrenness for the coming year.
• The legacy: The Lupercalia persisted from Rome’s earliest period through the late fifth century CE, one of the last pagan rites to survive in Christian Rome, until Pope Gelasius I suppressed it around 494 CE.

The cave was at the southwest foot of the Palatine, half-hidden by a fig tree the Romans called the Ficus Ruminalis. Inside, the rock was damp, and in the oldest accounts a spring ran through it. This was the Lupercal - the place where, as every Roman knew, a she-wolf had found two abandoned infants and nursed them. The cave smelled of animal warmth and wet stone, and the Romans never built over it. They left it open. They hung garlands on the fig tree. They came back every February.

What happened there each year on the fifteenth - the Lupercalia - was old enough that even the Romans could not entirely explain it. Varro traced it to Arcadian settlers who had worshipped Pan on the Palatine before Rome existed. Ovid connected it to Faunus, the Roman god of flocks and forests, whose appetites were as ungovernable as the animals he watched over. Livy folded it into the founding story itself. The rite meant different things to different centuries, but the rite did not change.

The Wolf and the Twins

The founding story gave the Lupercal its first meaning. When Amulius seized the throne of Alba Longa and forced Rhea Silvia into the Vestals, and when Mars came to her and she bore twin sons, the king ordered the infants thrown into the Tiber. The river was in flood. The basket washed ashore at the base of the Palatine, beneath the fig tree, at the mouth of a cave.

A she-wolf found them. She lay down and let them nurse. A woodpecker - Mars’s bird - brought them scraps. The shepherd Faustulus discovered them there and carried them home to his wife, Acca Larentia, who raised them as her own. But the Romans never forgot the cave. It was the first threshold the founders crossed, from death to life, and the wolf who saved them became the emblem of the city.

Romulus and Remus, once grown, kept up the rites that the Arcadian king Evander had supposedly established on that hill generations earlier - rites to Faunus, or to the wolf, or to the strange unnamed numen of the place itself. Plutarch says the young men of Alba Longa used to run naked through the hills after a sacrifice, and that Romulus and Remus continued this practice. When Remus was captured by Amulius’s men during one such run, it set in motion the confrontation that restored Numitor to his throne and led to the founding of Rome.

The Goats, the Dog, and the Knife

The ritual itself, as practiced in the Republic and Empire, began at the Lupercal cave. The Luperci - priests organized into two colleges, the Fabiani and the Quinctiales, each named for old patrician families - gathered at the cave with goats and a dog. The goats were sacrificed first. Then the dog, an unusual victim in Roman religion, where dogs were rarely offered. The dog’s presence marked the rite as something apart, something older than the temple cults of the Capitoline.

Two young men, usually of noble family, were brought forward. A priest touched their foreheads with the sacrificial knife, still wet with goat’s blood. Then another priest wiped the blood away with wool soaked in milk. At this moment the two young men were required to laugh. No source explains why. The laughter may have been a sign of rebirth, or of the absurdity of the rite, or of something the Romans themselves had forgotten. But it was required.

After this, the Luperci cut the goatskins into long strips - februa, from which the month of February takes its name. The word meant instruments of purification. The young men, now dressed in nothing but loincloths of goatskin, took up the strips and ran.

The Run Through the Streets

They ran from the Lupercal up and around the Palatine, following a route so old it predated the city’s streets. They struck at anyone in their path with the goatskin strips. The blows were not gentle. Plutarch describes crowds pressing forward, not pulling away. Women in particular stepped into the runners’ path and held out their hands, palms up, to be struck.

The belief was specific: a blow from the februa promoted fertility and eased the pains of childbirth. Barren women sought it out deliberately. The rite was not symbolic in the way a modern reader might expect - it was transactional. The goatskin carried the numen of Faunus, whose domain was animal increase, the swelling of flocks, the quickening of seed. The blow transferred that power. A woman struck by the strip had been touched by the god.

The runners completed the circuit of the Palatine and returned to the cave. The rite was done. The city had been purified - februare, to purify, giving the month its name twice over. Whatever pestilence or barrenness had settled on Rome during the winter was beaten out of it, literally, by young men running half-naked through the cold with strips of goat hide.

Faunus in the Cave

Behind all of it stood Faunus. He was not Jupiter, not a god of order and law. He was older and stranger - a god of the wild margin where the city met the forest, where cultivated land gave way to pasture and pasture gave way to wolves. His other name was Lupercus, the wolf-god, though some scholars disputed this even in antiquity. Ovid tells a story in the Fasti of Faunus creeping into a bedchamber to assault a sleeping woman and discovering, to his humiliation, that the figure in the bed was Hercules in a woman’s dress. The story was meant to explain why the Luperci ran naked - Faunus, having been fooled by clothing, demanded his worshippers wear none.

It is a comic story, and the Romans told it as one. But Faunus was not comic. He spoke in dreams. He haunted groves. His voice came from the ground. The Lupercal cave was his throat, and the rite that poured out of it each February was his breath moving through the city.

The Last Lupercalia

The festival survived the fall of the Republic, the rise of the Empire, the conversion of Constantine, and the slow draining of the old religion. In 494 CE, Pope Gelasius I wrote a letter to the senator Andromachus, who had defended the Lupercalia as harmless tradition. Gelasius was not gentle. He asked whether the senators who praised the rite were willing to run naked through the streets themselves. They were not.

The Lupercalia stopped. The cave on the Palatine silted over and was lost for fifteen centuries. In 2007, archaeologists reported finding a grotto beneath the ruins of Augustus’s palace on the Palatine, decorated with mosaics and seashells. Whether it is the Lupercal remains disputed. The fig tree is gone. The spring, if it ran, runs somewhere else now. February kept its name.