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previous: Chapter 8 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Lupercalia by Alberta Mildred Franklin New York, 1921 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 10

 p83  Chapter IX
The Blood-Ceremony of the Lupercalia

There remains to be considered the curious rite of the Lupercalia in which a sword was dipped into the blood of the sacrifice and pressed upon the foreheads of two young men. The blood was then washed away with wool moistened in milk. After that the youths must laugh.​1 This ceremony has provoked wide speculation because it is utterly different from the usual cult-practices of the Romans. To gain an understanding of the use and significance of these media, we must turn to the ritualistic acts of Greece.

Of the use of blood in primitive religions we have countless instances. The almost unvarying idea of uncivilized man is that blood is not merely essential to life, but the very life itself.​2 Consequently in sacrifices offered to earth-gods to stir their life-giving power, the blood of the victim is often poured upon the ground. By a transference of idea, since the sacrificial animal has within it the essence of the deity, its blood is regarded as supreme embodiment of the god's mystic potency.​3 Man may partake of this divine power by various means: he may drink the blood, or he may have it applied to him externally, as was done in the Lupercalia. Thus he comes into contact with the life-force and is purified.​4 For this reason the blood of the sacrificial victim was used to cleanse men from murder and from madness.​5 In ceremonies of lustration, sprinkling with blood was the surest of all cleansing media.​6 It seems to have been employed as one of the lustral ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries.​7 In the rite of the Taurobolium the worshipper, in a pit beneath the sacrificial animal, won purity by allowing the sacred blood to flow upon him until he was literally covered.​8 This ceremony, which was probably of great antiquity in Asia,​9 came to be practised in the Cybele-Attis cult as one of its most important features.​10 In Italy the Taurobolium was ardently observed during several centuries of the Empire.​11 The Orphics, who specialized in lustral media,​12 received into their religion the god Attis together with his bloody rite.​13 The Orphics put themselves into contact with the divine power in another ceremony, the Omophagia, in which they imbibed  p84 the sacrificial blood, along with the raw flesh, of the newly slain animal.14

In these instances of the use of blood in Greek ritual, it was either an offering to the earth-mother, that she might recreate into new life this life-force which was restored to her, or it was a means by which man, coming into direct contact with the essence of deity, might be freed from all the forces of evil. Freedom from evil was likewise the purpose of the Lupercalia, hence the use of blood in that festival may reasonably be regarded as parallel to that of the Greek ceremonies. The rite of blood-sprinkling, belonging as it did to the worship of chthonic deities, and appearing most markedly in the cult of Attis and in the ritual of the Orphics, may be accepted as characteristically Mediterranean.

In the chthonic cults of Italy, as in Greece, the blood of the sacrifice was frequently poured upon the earth. Thus it was offered to the Manes​15 and to Terminus.​16 In the quaint rite that occurred on the Ides of October, a horse was slain, his tail was suspended in the Regia and the blood allowed to drip upon the hearth. The blood was preserved, it seems, by the Vestal Virgins, and later, mixed with the ashes of unborn calves, was sprinkled upon the fires through which the people leaped in the Parilia.​17 Here blood is used in a mystic rite whose purpose is interpreted as the same as that of the Lupercalia — lustration and fertility.​18 But in the details of the ritual the two festivals offer no likeness such as we discovered in the Pelasgian ceremonies.

The sword by which the blood was placed upon the youths' heads should probably be classed with other weapons, such as the double axe and the figure-eight shield of Crete, which were holy objects in Mediterranean ritual.​19 The significance of the sacrificial sword in the Taurobolium is shown by its constant representation upon the Taurobolic altars.​20 The regular association of the sickle with Cronus suggests its sanctity in his cult.​21 In Italy the lance of Juno Quiritis and of Quirinus, and the lance and the ancilia of Mars were especially venerated.22

The blood smeared upon the foreheads of the young men was wiped off by a bit of wool dipped in milk. In the same way in Greek rites the sacrificial blood which had been sprinkled upon a man was removed by various cleansing media. "The blood was too holy to be left in permanent contact with a man who was presently to  p85 return to common life."​23 The Orphics frequently smeared earth upon the devotees as a means of cleansing, and removed it by a ceremonial wiping off.​24 So important in ceremonies of purification was this bedaubing with clay and its removal that the words περιμάττειν and ἀπομάττειν became standing expressions for mystic cleansing.​25 Of this ceremonial wiping off the Lupercalia affords the only example in Roman cults.

From the sanctity which the skin of a sacrificial animal possessed, it is natural that wool should have been of significant and constant use in the religion of both Greeks and Romans. The binding of the priest's forehead with woolen fillets before he sacrificed was a symbol that he was possessed by the deity.​26 Naturally, therefore, wool was potent for purification. Ovid, in his list of the materials that have cleansing power, mentions wool first of all.​27 Wool was included among the offerings of first fruits and natural products which were placed in the kernos and carried as holy objects in the Mysteries of Eleusis.28

Milk, used in the Lupercalia to moisten the wool, was employed among both Greeks and Romans in the earliest times as a libation to chthonic deities. But of its mystic use in the Lupercalia, native Roman religion affords us no other instance. That meaning can be found only in the religion of the Orphics. The use of milk in the Orphic mysteries is indicated by certain gold tablets which are very important sources of knowledge of the Orphic cults. These tablets were placed close by the dead person and contained directions for his conduct in the lower world: formulas that he was to repeat, or statements of ritual that he had performed. They constituted for the dead man his card of admission to the realm of the blest.​29 The close similarity of phrasing in the tablets indicates that they echo some important ritualistic poem of the Orphics.​30 Two tablets contain the words, "Thou shalt be god instead of mortal. A kid, I have fallen into milk."​31 These words, like the other formulas, must describe some symbolic act which the initiate has performed. The promise, "Thou shalt be god instead of mortal" suggests that the following words, "A kid, I have fallen into milk," express in mystic fashion the Orphic's attainment of the highest bliss. The meaning of a kid in this formula has been explained by Dr. Dieterich, who notes that Ἐρίφιος was a title of Dionysus which was used by the Dorians of the Peloponnesus and of Southern Italy, being especially  p86 favored at Metapontum, near which these tablets were found.​32 Thus in this region Dionysus was known as "The Kid," just as he was called "The Bull" in Crete. Consequently, when the Orphic calls himself a kid he seems to identify himself with the Kid‑Dionysus.​33 But "The Kid" is an infant god, and so must be nourished upon milk.​34 By the use of milk, therefore, the initiates further symbolized their union with the god.​35 The expression, "I have fallen," has been taken to indicate an actual bath in milk,​36 or a vigorous substitute for the words, "I have found," the worshipper's complete union with the deity being probably symbolized by his drinking milk or being sprinkled with milk.​37a In either case, the words, "A kid, I have fallen into milk" seem to indicate that the initiate has been mystically reborn and transformed into a god.​37b The same idea appears in the cult of Cybele. In the sacred drama, after Attis has died and has been restored to life, the worshippers end their mourning fast by partaking of milk. In doing so they seem to be in divine communion with the youthful god, who has just entered life anew.38

The laughter of the youths, which formed the final act of the blood-ceremony, finds no parallel in Roman cult, and very little in Greek. It has been explained (a) as the indication by the lads of their readiness to be sacrificed,​39 (b) as the sign that, after their ritualistic slaughter, they were restored to life,​40 (c) as the symbol of their entrance upon a new life of purity.​41 If we are correct in our belief that a human being was not the original victim at the Lupercalia, neither of the first two explanations of the laugh can be accepted. On the other hand, the third view, that it was the expression of joy over being cleansed and so restored to new life, is in complete harmony with the symbolism of the purifying blood and the milk. If so, it corresponds to the joyous words uttered by the Orphic after he had been purified by the smearing on and the wiping off of mud, "Bad have I fled, better have I found."​42 The cult of Attis, in which the blood and the milk had a part so similar to their use in the Lupercalia, offers another parallel. After the communicants had ended their mourning for Attis and had received milk as the sign of their admission to a new life, they celebrated the festival called Ἱλαρεία.​43 The uncontrolled expression of joy which characterized that festival may be likened to the laughter that concluded the Lupercalia.

 p87  As we sum up the significance of this strange part of the Lupercalia, we see that, almost without exception, the elements belong characteristically to Pelasgian religion. Sprinkling with blood as a means of purification or of communion with the deity, a ceremonial wiping off as a sign that old things are done away, and a sprinkling with milk symbolizing a new life of purity and of kinship with divinity, were, to many Greeks, ritual acts that called forth profound reverence. Of such rites the cults indigenous to Italy give us not a single instance except the Lupercalia. That suggests the possibility that this bit of ritual was borrowed, as were so many elements of the Roman religion, from the Greeks.44

If such was the case, the Orphics probably introduced these ceremonies; for only in their rites and in those of Attis, whom they took as their own god, were these acts significant. Was there any medium by which the influence of the Orphics could have become so pronounced in Rome as to account for a graft of their ritual into this ancient Roman festival?

The Cumaean Sibyl immediately comes to the mind of one who seeks to explain the presence of a foreign cult in Rome. From very early days she had accustomed the Romans to receive Greek deities or to add Greek ceremonials to the native rites.​45 Under her guidance one chthonic god after another, Demeter, Dionysus, Proserpina, Hermes, Poseidon, Dis, and Aesculapius, came to Rome. The ancient Roman cult of Saturn was Hellenized by the addition of a lectisternium and other features of Greek ritual. The ceremonials directed by the Sibyl were of a mystic or a spectacular type, appealing to the same emotions of awe or of religious enthusiasm as the ritual acts of the Orphics. The influence of the Sibyl was most marked during the war with Hannibal,​46 when the people seemed no longer able to secure help from their native gods, and so appealed repeatedly to the Sibyl. After Trasimene, a spectacular lectisternium was held: six pairs of gods, Greek and Roman being taken without distinction, were placed on couches to receive offerings. Dr. Warde Fowler declares that this event marks the turning-point in Roman religion: "the dividing line between di indigetes and di novensiles now vanishes forever."​47 From now on, Greek ritual was employed alike for Greek and for Roman deities. After the disaster of Cannae many foreign rites were introduced. The people even resorted to a religious rite utterly abhorrent to Romans:​48 two  p88 Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in the Forum Boarium. Finally the Romans brought to their city, with all pomp, the statue of the Magna Mater of Pessinus. During the same year Dionysus was received in Rome. These last arrivals were not accorded the treatment given to other foreign gods: they were not kept outside the Pomoerium, but were given temples on the Palatine, just above the ancient cult-center on the Cermalus, hence close by the Lupercal. Owing to this proximity, these two powerful deities had an excellent opportunity to influence the cult of Lupercus. The Phrygian Cybele, though she was not usually included among the variant names of the Orphic deity, was the same in essence and was honored by the same mystic and orgiastic rites; while the worship of Dionysus might be called the kernel of Orphic religion.49

For the direct influence of Orphism upon Rome, we must turn to the cities of Southern Italy, with which Rome, even under the Etruscans, had active trade relations.​50 In the wake of the traders various Greek gods, as, for example, Heracles and the Dioscuri, made their way into Rome.​51 Damia, the earth-goddess of Tarentum, was identified with Bona Dea, and imposed certain features of her ritual upon the native cult.​52 The foisting of Greek rites upon so ancient a goddess as Bona Dea is especially significant. In these Greek cities of Southern Italy, Orphism was honored more than in any other region. The teachings of Orpheus were accepted as the basic principles of the school of Pythagoras, which was established at Velia, and which was influential throughout the neighboring cities.​53 Some of the Orphic tablets mentioned above were unearthed at Sybaris.​54 At Tarentum both the ritual of Pythagoras and the mysteries of Dionysus were especially cultivated.​55 With these particular cities, Velia, Tarentum, and Sybaris, Rome had especially active communication from the earliest times.​56 During the Samnite Wars the Romans came to know the Pythagoreans in their own home. Appius Claudius Caecus is said to have embraced their faith,​57 and even the hard-headed elder Cato was interested in listening to their theories.​58 The vogue which this philosophy gained in Rome is evidenced by the persistent tradition that Numa was a Pythagorean.59

By 181 B.C. Pythagoreanism was strong enough in Rome to attempt a daring fraud. On Mount Janiculum was dug up a coffin bearing an inscription which declared that it contained the body  p89 of Numa. Within it were found, not a skeleton, but books on Pythagorean philosophy which purported to be the writings of Numa.​60a The purpose must have been to win state support for mysticism under the prestige of Numa's name. The hope that such an attempt could succeed argues a rather wide-spread acceptance in Rome of Pythagorean philosophy. But the ruse was doomed to failure: the Senate immediately denounced these Orphic books as a fraud, and ordered that they be burned in the Comitium.​60b A companion picture to this occurrence is furnished by an outbreak five years earlier, when a large part of the populace turned with the utmost abandon to the orgies of Dionysus. Meetings were held at night, and the wild frenzy which prevailed in Thrace or on Mount Cithaeron was rampant in Rome. In this case, too, the Senate took firm measures. This strange religion was denounced as a coniuratio, and the celebrants punished as conspirators against the state. Yet the Senate provided a safety valve for their religious fervor. Under carefully stipulated conditions, those who felt that they could not conscientiously give up the new religion, were allowed to continue it.​61 These two events coming so close together show very clearly the following which the religious ecstasy and the mystic ritual acts of the Orphics had won in Rome. So threatening were the proportions of this new cult that the Senate did not dare follow its usual practice of religious tolerance; and yet infection so intense and so widespread must not be deprived of an outlet, lest the evil break forth still more violently. A judicious state control was, therefore, the solution.62

This survey of the influence of the Cumaean Sibyl and of Orphism upon Rome shows that a transfer of Orphic rites to an ancient Roman ceremony like the Lupercalia was inherently possible. For centuries the Romans were bringing in one after another of the primitive chthonic deities of Greece, were identifying various Italian gods with Greek gods, and altering the established national ritual to suit Greek practices. At any time during this period the partial Hellenizing of the Lupercalia would have been in harmony with the spirit of the times. Such a change could have occurred most easily, however, during the Hannibalic war or the two decades immediately following, when the people, having received into their city Cybele and Dionysus, were deeply stirred by the orgies of  p90 Dionysus and by the beliefs of the Pythagoreans. During that period the insertion of certain Orphic rites into the Lupercalia would have been only one event of numberless such. Moreover, the Lupercalia, with its emphasis upon purification, would have been an especially natural ceremony to receive an Orphic graft; for purification was above all else the quest of the Orphics, and they were expert in the media by which to attain it.

Assuming that the blood-rite of the Lupercalia may have been of Orphic origin, we observe that no one ceremony was taken over bodily by the Romans, but that this part of the Lupercalia must have been, rather, a psychological product. The people's state of mind during the war with Hannibal is clearly indicated by the numerous portents which were announced. Early in the war came an omen suggesting that Mars, the later incarnation of the old wolf-deity, had forsaken his people: a wolf came and snatched a guard's sword from its sheath and carried it off.​63 A little later the statues of the wolf which were in Rome sweated.​64 Such omens as these may easily have caused the people to consider with concern the ceremony at the wolf's cave, and to wonder if that, like so many others, had lost its power to protect them. Frequently in the first alarm of Hannibal's arrival in Italy, blood appeared among the omens. Two shields exuded drops of blood; the springs at Caere and the fount of Hercules were stained with blood; at Arretium the reapers found themselves harvesting bloody heads of grain; and after the battle of Cannae blood flowed in the river beside Amiternum.​65 These omens of blood are a wholly natural phenomenon during the carnage of war; but it would be equally natural that rites which employed blood as a means of purification should appeal to the people. In magic and in religious rites akin to magic, the homeopathic principle that like cures like is always potent.

Assuming that the insertion of the blood-rite into the Lupercalia could most easily have occurred during the emotional turmoil caused by the Hannibalic war, we may perhaps define the probable date still more closely. The first few years of the war offer the least probability. Livy tells explicitly the alarming prodigies that occurred at that time, and the strange expedients adopted to annul them. Had the ceremony of the Lupercalia been altered then, we should certainly expect it to be mentioned along with the other innovations. But as the war goes on, Livy gives much less detail.  p91 Probably his artistic sense rebelled at painting the same picture too often. After the battle of Cannae, he contents himself with saying that various prodigies occurred, and that certain unusual ceremonies were performed.​66 Three years later, when there was another outburst of omens, he passes on with the mere statement, "Due measures were taken by decree of the pontiffs."​67 As the war dragged on, "Such religious fervor," Livy says, "assailed the state, and in large part of foreign origin at that, that it seemed as if either men or gods must have completely changed." Not only within private houses was the Roman ritual broken down, but even in the Forum and in the Capitol were disorderly throngs of women who, neither in their prayers nor in their sacrifices, followed the ritual of their ancestors.​68 Following this, came the command of the Senate that no foreign rites be performed at any national shrine.​69 This order, on the one hand, shows that alien ritual acts had invaded the established state ceremonials of the Romans; but, on the other hand, makes it improbable that the blood-rite of the Lupercalia, if added to the ceremony at this time, would have continued. Therefore the years following this occurrence offer a more reasonable time for such a change. The Dionysia of 186 B.C. and the discovery of the Pythagorean Books in 181 certainly cannot have been isolated outbreaks. Had Livy chosen to give us in detail the changes in religious ritual which occurred during the latter part of the period of the foreign wars, he might have resolved for us many a knotty problem. As it is, we have to admit that after the first two years of the war with Hannibal there occurred many alterations in religious belief and form of which we know nothing. Among these innovations which Livy passes over in silence, might easily have been an addition of Orphic rites to the Lupercalia.

It is interesting that Plutarch, the only author to mention the blood-ritual, connects its origin with a war. But, just as the temple of Jupiter Stator, which was actually built in 294 B.C., was referred to Romulus, so this part of the Lupercalia was said to be a memorial of the struggle of Romulus with Amulius, "the blood symbolizing the bloodshed and terror of that time."70

A scrap of evidence suggests that the blood-ceremony was not a part of the original rites of the Lupercalia. Plutarch, when speaking of those upon whom the blood-rite was performed, always  p92 uses the word boys, μειράκια. This seems an impossible term to apply to the Luperci.​a Mark Antony was consul when he acted as a Lupercus.​71 The μειράκια, therefore, must have been other than the priests of Lupercus. Presumably they were admitted into the ceremony for the express purpose of this blood-ritual. But this would give a clear indication that the blood-rite was not an original part of the festival. If it had been, the Luperci would have been the natural persons for the central figures, not two striplings. Livy says that the missionaries of Dionysus in Rome sought especially to win the young to their mysteries, and that many youths of high rank became enthusiastic devotees.​72 The same wave of emotion may have introduced the boys and their mystic rites into the Lupercalia.

If such was the case, the events that immediately followed explain why Plutarch is the only one who mentioned this strange part of the festival. The prompt measures taken to combat the Dionysia and the relentless destruction of the Pythagorean books, show that the Roman authorities were resolved to rescue their state religion from these emotional beliefs that were threatening to engulf it. The same purpose is manifest in the treatment of the cult of Cybele: native Romans were forbidden to join her priesthood, and the priests were restricted, except on certain days of the year, to their own precincts.​73 It was not until the time of Claudius that the Magna Mater was restored to full honor.​74 In view of this state policy, we can well understand that Orphic rites, if introduced into the Lupercalia, would soon have been thrust into the background. In accord with this policy of suppression, priests and the compilers of the Fasti would naturally have avoided making any record of the addition of these foreign rites to the Lupercalia. Thus the silence upon that subject of all writers except Plutarch would be reasonably accounted for. Almost certainly Ovid knew nothing of this ceremony. It was the Greek poet Butas, who would naturally have been interested in this rite of his own people, who seems to have been Plutarch's authority. Plutarch is, likewise, the only one to comment upon the sacrifice of the dog, a rite more characteristically Greek than Roman.

The trifling evidence which we have to apply to this problem is, at least, not against the theory that the blood-rite may have been introduced into the Lupercalia during the second Punic War or  p93 the years immediately following. This theory is wholly in accord with reason. We have, as it were, two sides of an equation, and it is tempting to place between them the sign of equality: on the one side, there is in the Lupercalia an incongruous bit of ceremonial which has no unity with the other cult-acts of the festival, and which finds no parallel in the ritualistic practices of the Romans, but which is markedly like many Greek rites, especially those of the Orphics; on the other hand, there is the reception in Rome of a stream of Greek deities and cults, the process being intensified by the strain of a great war, when the people repeatedly sought help from just such mystic rites as this of the Lupercalia. The old ceremonial, devised to rid man of all that would obstruct the activity of deific power, would then have been spiritualized by the Orphic's assurance of perfect cleansing and of communion, even of kinship, with divinity.

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The Author's Notes:

1 Plut., Rom., 21.

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2 Tylor, II.381.

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3 Gruppe, 891.

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4 Stengel, Die Griechischen Kultusaltertümer, 139‑42.

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5 Aesch., Eum., 283; Apoll. Rhod., 4.477‑9, 704.

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6 Stengel, Opferbräuche der Griechen, 30; Diels, Sibyllinische Blätter, 73.

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7 Farnell, III.168.

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8 Prudent., Peristeph., 10.1011‑50.

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9 Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, 180.

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10 Decharme, in Daremberg-Saglio, I.1686.

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11 Espérandieu, in Daremberg-Saglio, V.50.

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12 Stengel, Kultusalt., 150.

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13 Farnell, III.302.

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14 Harrison, 481‑9; Monceaux, in Daremberg-Saglio, IV.253.

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15 Verg., Aen., 3.63‑7.

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16 Ov., Fast., 2.655.

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17 Fest., 178; Ov., Fast., 4.731‑4; Prop., 4.1.18.

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18 Fowler, R. F., 247.

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19 Mackenzie, Crete, 310‑2. See also above, page 6.

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20 Espérandieu, in Daremberg-Saglio, V.48, 49.

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21 Lippert, II.498.

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22 Preller, I.339.

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23 Smith, Semites, 315; see also Schoemann, Griechische Altertümer, II.13.

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24 Nonnus Dionys., 27.228; Poll., Onomast., 8.65; 7.188; Harpocrat. ἀπομάττων.

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25 Demosth., de Cor., 259; Ammonius, περιμάξαι; Lucian, Necy., 7.

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 p94  26 Lippert, II.537; Diels, 122.

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27 Fast., 2.19‑28.

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28 Athen., 11.56 p. 478D; Harrison, 159‑60.

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29 Kaibel, C. I. G. I. S., 481A, B, C. For the discussion of these tablets, see Dieterich, Hym. Orph., 30‑7; id., Nekyia, 84‑95; Harrison, 573‑99.

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30 Reinach, Une formule orphique, in Rev. Arch., vol. XXXIX, 204.

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31 Kaibel, C. I. G. I. S., 642, 841A. See also Harrison, 584, 586.

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32 Hym. orph., 36. See also Hesych., Ἐρίφιος.

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33 Reinach, Rev. Arch., vol. XXXIX, 207; id. Cultes, II.128; Cook, Zeus, 674‑5.

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34 Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, 171. Milk was one of the gifts which streamed from the earth for the worshippers of Dionysus (Eur. Bacch., 142, 708, et al.).

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35 Reinach, Cultes, II.128.

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36 Cook, Zeus, 675‑7.

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37a 37b Reinach, Cultes, II.129‑32; id. Rev. Arch., vol. XXXIX, 206; Harrison, 594‑7.

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38 Farnell, III.301. This corresponds to the usage of the early Christians, by which milk was offered to the new communicants as the sign of new birth (Usener, Milch und Honig, Rhein. Mus., vol. LVII, 183).

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39 Lippert, II.564.

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40 Mannhardt, Myth. Forsch., 98.

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41 Deubner, Arch. Rel., vol. XIII, 502.

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42 Demos., de Cor., 313.

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43 Farnell, III.301.

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44 Dr. Deubner (Arch. Rel., vol. XIII, 506‑8) believes that the blood-ritual was borrowed from the Greeks, and that it signified purification and new birth. He holds, however, that it, and also the dog‑sacrifice, was added to the Lupercalia under the influence of Augustus. In view of Augustus's rationalistic temperament and of his desire to restore the ancient cults of Rome, it is hard to accept this view.

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45 For the earlier influence exerted by the Cumaean Sibyl upon the religion of Rome, see Wissowa, R. K., 50‑2; Fowler, R. E., 255‑66; Carter, Rel. Rome, 40‑5.

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46 For a survey of the changes effected in Roman religion during this period, see Fowler, R. E., 314‑31; Wissowa, R. K., 58‑64; Carter, Religion of Numa, 104‑15.

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47 R. E., 319.

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48 Liv., 22.57.6.

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49 Harrison, 455.

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50 See p81 n. 43.

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51 Wissowa, R. K., 268‑73.

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52 Fowler, R. F., 105.

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53 Cic., Tusc., 1.38; Liv., 1.18.2.

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54 See p85.

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55 Dieterich, Hym. orph., 39.

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56 Schwegler, I.683; Pais, Anc. It., 303‑44.

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57 Cic., Tusc., 4.2.4.

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58 Cic., Cat. M., 78.

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59 Liv., 1.18.2.

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 p95  60a 60b Liv., 40.29; Plin., N. H., 13.84‑6.

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61 Liv., 39.8‑16.

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62 Fowler, R. E., 344‑9.

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63 Liv., 21.62.4.

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64 Liv., 22.1.12.

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65 Liv., 22.1.9, 10; 22.36.7; 24.44.8.

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66 Liv., 22.57.2, 6.

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67 Liv., 24.44.9.

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68 Liv., 25.1.6‑8.

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69 Liv., 25.1.

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70 Plut., Rom., 21.

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71 Suet., Jul., 79.

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72 See note 61. See also Fowler, R. E., 347.

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73 Dionys., 2.19.º

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74 Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, 55.

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Thayer's Note:

a In the article Lupercalia in Daremberg-Saglio, p1402, it is stated that Augustus forbade beardless youths to "play the rôle of Luperci", the sources cited being Suet. Aug. 31 and Mon. Ancyr. 4.2. As you will see by following the links, such a statement cannot be made from those sources. The second citation mentions the Lupercal but says nothing about the Lupercalia, a fortiori about the Luperci and beardless youths; the first merely states that Augustus forbade beardless youths to run in the Lupercalia: not that they were Luperci, nor in fact that they were forbidden to be.

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