Lupercalia: A (Slightly Poetic) Analysis

Happy Valentine's to all who celebrate (yes, I'm including Galentines and all the other iterations), and happy day-of-scorning to those who despise the holiday. While this post will find you one day after the official day of festivities, it coincides perfectly with the Roman equivalent of Valentine's Day (the association of love with February appears to be a millennia-long trend). But how long has this holiday been "swinging"? Although considered a modern, consumerist invention, the concept of celebrating love (and lust) has a history dating back to our (or at least my) favorite ancient civilization: the Ancient Romans. Currently, Valentine's Day illuminates much about our society —namely that we live in a society that signifies love with gifts, equates lust with pink and red, values heteronormative and monogamous couplings, and has an odd fascination with bouquets of roses. A necessary question, then, is: can the Roman equivalent of our Valentine's Day provide any meaningful insight into Roman love? And, first and foremost, what even was this holiday anyway?

Lupercalia: History & Symbol

Lupercalia was one of the most ancient (and, frankly, unsettling) festivals held annually in Rome. Each year in mid-February, often on the 15th, this celebration of love did not unfold, as one might assume, in temples laden with incense or even through personal or civic processions, but in a strange, even embarrassing fashion (at least to those onlooking who have since been removed by thousands of years). Yet for centuries, to both the Romans and larger civilizations, Lupercalia remained a central and meaningful part of religious life.

Although I previously proposed Lupercalia as a precursor to our modern Valentine's Day, it can in no way be diminished as such. Instead, Lupercalia was a ritual that continues to expose larger Roman conceptions of life, death, and love itself. It reveals to us, onlooking, that love was, to the Romans, not a private emotional state to be explored between lovers, but a force that was larger than any two lovebirds and had the power to make, or destroy, entire communities. To understand Lupercalia is, therefore, to understand Roman love.

Lupercalia's name is taken from the Lupercal, a cave situated at the base of the Palatine Hill. To understand this location's significance, you must be familiar with the story of Rome's creation. In its extremely compressed form, the story goes that two twins, Romulus and Remus, after having been left to die by a despotic ruler, were saved by a she-wolf, who nursed them at the Palatine Hill. It was these twins who went on to found Rome (named after Romulus after a filial standoff). Thus, this location embodies the foundation of Roman society in notions of motherly and divine love.

Additionally, the god most often associated with the festival's celebration is Fanus, an ancient Italian deity representing the wilderness, prophecy, and fertility, who was worshipped under the name Lupercus (another plausible explanation for the name of Lupercalia). Considering the festival's divine connotations and its connection to the very founding of Rome, many Romans viewed it as older than the Republic itself, older even than Rome as a city. Its authority, therefore, transcends most other Roman festivities simply because Romans themselves likely didn't completely understand it. Plutarch, writing mere centuries later compared to our millennia, certainly admitted to not doing so. Therefore, I urge you to take the remainder of this analysis with a healthy grain of salt and not as doctrine.

The ritual of Lupercalia began with a sacrifice at the Lupercal: two goats and a dog. The goat symbolized male potency and sexual excess (the goat was commonly associated with lustful gods and untamed desire). The dog served as a representation of the she-wolf, embodying a guardian figure, suggesting protection. After the sacrifice, Romans would take the blood of the animals and smear it on the foreheads of two young aristocrats (representing Romulus and Remus). Always theatrical, the blood was wiped away with wool soaked in milk -- at this moment, the young men are reported to have laughed. The hides of the sacrificed goats were then cut into strips known as februa (from which the month of February took its name). Using these strips as instruments to ensure fertility, priests (known as Luperci) ran through the streets of Rome naked, striking all impregnable women they encountered to grant them fertility for the remainder of the year.

Alright, so clearly this celebration is a little more extreme than a box of chocolates. In fact, it has been so effectively cemented in the cultural memory largely because it is so foreign and violent to us modern-day readers. A festival for fertility ending with a heinous display of nakedness and a beating of young women? What does that say about Roman society? I'll be attempting to answer that question now.

First, the knowledge that women of childbearing age actively sought to be struck by the februa indicates a deeply entrenched Roman belief that love and reproduction were not sentimental matters. Instead, they were divine and required sacrifice in order to occur. The Roman gods, the Romans believed, could directly impact their lives, so much so that women were petrified they wouldn't successfully have children that year if a naked priest waving around a goatskin did not attack them. The ritualization of such contact also illustrates that the Romans had a far smaller distinction between public and private spheres as they pertained to love. Fertility was not a concern confined to the bedroom or to an individual couple or woman, but rather a matter in which all of society participated; the body of a Roman woman was a shared, not personal, concern.

Second, Lupercalia illustrates a fundamental difference between modern and Roman conceptions of love. For Romans, love was not something primarily expressed through mutual affection or intimacy. Instead, love was an external force that took the form of a God, which could help or scorn individuals as it saw fit. Whether it be Cupid shooting arrows or Venus seducing men, the Romans do not view these stories simply as myth, but as indicative of forces larger than worldly reality. Additionally, there is a reason images of love, such as Cupid's arrows, often employ imagery of violence; Romans believed that love operated through force, as evidenced by the lashes of Lupercalia.

Third, Lupercalia's structure exposes the gender dynamic at the heart of Roman love. Although female fertility is what is being celebrated and sacrificed for, women possess little agency in the celebration itself. Men ran, stripped, and lashed. Women waited. Women absolutely participated consensually, but never wielded ritual authority, reflecting broader Roman social hierarchies in which men possessed disproportionately more religious and political power than their female counterparts.

Finally, Lupercalia reminds Romans and modern readers that Roman society is not built solely on order, law, and discipline. Lupercalia was wild. Naked bodies running through the streets, men covered in blood and milk -- this was not a neat holiday in the slightest. But rather than viewing Lupercalia as a failure of Roman civilization, we can view it as merely a reminder of Rome's divine foundations. To Romans, Rome was built upon and largely depended upon forces that could never be domesticated: the powers of thedivine. Lupercalia allowed for a celebration of these influences in a controlled, not destructive, chaos.

Poetic Representations of Lupercalia

Clearly, the cultural fascination with Lupercalia is still alive, leading one to naturally infer that the Romans themselves may also have been just a little obsessed with the holiday, or what it represents. Indeed, love (as evidenced by its near-constant repetition in the poetic analyses on this blog) is the subject of many an Ancient Latin poem. As we read one such poem that touches on Lupercalia and Roman love, see if you can connect any of the aforementioned symbolic representations to the poetic devices in the poem. As always, leave your findings below!

Ovid's Fausti 2.297-365

Original Latin

Tempus erat, cum ferre manus, cum ferre Luperciverbera nudatis apta lacertis erant.nuda patet ferroque manus est apta ferendo;corpore nuda dato ferrea tela gerunt.praebent et poscunt ramis verbera capris:nam teneras frondes durior herba facit.

Quis vetat Arcadio dictos a monte Lupercos?Faunus in Arcadia non fuit ille minor.Pan ibi dum teneros agitabat monte capellos,ingenium vati rite ferenda dedit.inde movet plausus et inania murmura fundit,et fugit ex oculis vox simul atque comes.

Sive quod Arcadiae pecudes habitasse feruntur,sive quod a pecore nomina tracta putant,sive quod arcitenens avida formidine capraterruit, et clausit tegmina dura lupo,nomina de causis variantur plurima certis:est aliquid, quod adhuc tradere tempus habet.

Cur igitur currant, et cur nudata feranturcorpora, et obscenae causa pudoris abest?silvicolam Faunum, non urbem, non colla decerepurpureas, nec eum ferre gravamen aquae.ille tegat se cortice, et cadat umbra sub ilice,et capiat silvas unde vocatur anus.

Verbera fert uterum, feriunt quoque pectora matrum:exiguum fetus hoc satis esse putant.tempus abest gravidis, iam mox paritura novercavota facit, verbera nuda petit.saepe meas illis ferro praebente papillasconcutit, et tenerum pectus amore ferit.

Cur tamen hoc faciant, quaerentem dicere fas est:corpora percussis verbera fecit anus.namque ubi iam nullos peperit Laertia partus,atque erat infecunda diu generosa domus,sacra monet Fauni, verbera capra dedit.

Credite, dicuntur vota redisse deo.nunc quoque percussas tangere corpus amat. nil opus est ferro: levius transire flagellopectus et exiguo vulnere fecundum est.sic quoque dat vires, animos sic excitat artus,sic fecunda suum terra parente parit.

English Translation

There was a time when the Luperci were fit to bear

the lash with arms stripped bare.

Naked, their bodies stand exposed, their hands made ready for the blade;

unclothed flesh carries weapons cut from hide.

Women offer themselves and ask for blows from goat-skin thongs,

for a harsher stroke makes tender bodies fruitful.

Who forbids the name Luperci from Arcadian hills?

Faunus there was no lesser god.

While Pan once drove his tender goats across the mountains,

he gave the poet skill to bear such rites in verse.

From there arise clashing sounds and empty murmurs,

and voice and speaker vanish together from the sight.

Whether because Arcadian herds once lived there,

or because names were drawn from cattle,

or because a goat frightened the wolf with sudden fear

and forced it from its hardened lair—

many certain causes yield uncertain names;

some truths time still refuses to give.

Why then do they run? Why are their bodies bared,

and why is shame banished from the rite?

Faunus is a god of woods, not cities;

purple robes and flowing water do not suit him.

Let him clothe himself in bark, lie beneath the oak’s shadow,

and dwell in forests from which the old god takes his name.

The lash strikes the womb, it strikes the mother’s breast;

they believe this slight pain is enough to bring forth life.

She who is not yet pregnant, though soon to give birth,

makes vows and seeks the naked blows.

Often the thong shakes my own breasts when wielded,

and strikes the tender chest with love’s own force.

Why they do this, it is right to tell the seeker:

blows once made barren bodies fruitful.

For when the house of Laertia bore no children

and noble lineage lay long infertile,

Faunus advised his rites; the goat supplied the lash.

Believe it: prayers were said to have returned to the god.

Even now, the body loves to be struck.

No blade is needed—lighter is the passing thong;

the chest grows fertile from the smallest wound.

Thus strength is given, thus limbs are stirred to life,

thus the fertile earth gives birth through its parent power.

In Conclusion...

By the end of antiquity, Lupercalia had transformed from a beloved tradition to a controversial one. Christian writers condemned its nakedness and violence, with its criticism reaching its pinnacle in the 5th century CE, with the denunciation of the festival. The disappearance of Lupercalia, however, marked more than the loss of a festival; it marked the loss of the Roman conception of love. Or at least that would be the case if the ancient and modern world could ever forget such a remarkable celebration. Through poets like Ovid and later Shakespeare and the like, Lupercalia has been preserved across generations, and so too has the Roman way of loving. As you enjoy the end of your Valentine's Day weekend, I implore you to give some thought to the way we celebrate Valentine's Day now, how that reflects our modern ethos surrounding love, and how your knowledge of the slightly absurd, slightly amazing tradition of Lupercalia might just change the way you think about love entirely.

We hope you enjoyed this (slightly) poetic analysis of Lupercalia! Please leave any comments, questions, or concerns below, and be sure to recommend future prose, poems, or Roman traditions for us to dive into!