The Lupercalia
by
Alberta Mildred Franklin

Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University
New York
1921

The Author and the Work

The author of this little book was a professor of classics who seems to have left no permanent trace other than this, her doctoral thesis. The biographical sketch of her that follows is from the last (unnumbered) page of it, after the index — what would be the jacket flap if there were a jacket:

The thesis itself seems to me somewhat unfocused, and I also suspect that Franklin's investigations were not as thorough as they appear: considering the difficulty and unusually multi-faceted quality of the subject, though, Franklin's attempt to pin down the Lupercalia is a valiant one; her own Synopsis of Chapters will be useful to you if, pressed for time, you're looking to get your bearings amid all the confusing material.

The dissertation's scholar­ly flaws are far outweighed by its usefulness in counteracting the reams of nonsense found about the Lupercalia both online and in printed books. Noticeable by its absence, for example, is any mention of the Lupercalia as the origin of Valentine's Day, of lotteries to draw boys' names out of urns, of ritual prostitution as a feature of the feast, and the like — all of which are the sheerest of inventions, strewn thru the Internet though they might be. It is regrettable, though, that in the very last paragraph, Franklin did fall into another common falsehood (the purported connection with the Christian feast of the Purification of the Virgin) thru failure to check the conjecture of a 16c writer, but the mistake is easily fixed there by a note. Also noticeable by its absence in Franklin's book is any pretension of certainty, in which she did very well: first‑hand ancient sources on the subject boil down to a very small scattering of texts, most of them incidental; any work on the topic must in essence be a detective tale or a jigsaw puzzle with many parts missing.

As an aside of my own, it is noteworthy also that, as far as I can tell, not a single ancient artistic depiction of the festival has come down to us (or at least, none has been identified as such); so we can also throw out, as products of modern imagination, the lurid images found online, ornament and fodder of blogs and cultist sites.

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here was the original unbound printing of the doctoral dissertation; there may be no other. It is in the public domain, having been published in the United States in 1921. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

The book is nominally online elsewhere, thrown up on GoogleBooks as a photocopy; the present transcription will improve the book's online footprint and make it easier for the student to check the source material so meticulously cited in Franklin's notes: where possible, the citations are linked to the actual texts, something a bald photocopy cannot provide. As it turned out, it also gave me an opportunity to correct a number of citations.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread, although not quite minutely enough: my thanks to Vann Turner for his further reading, which caught a dozen typos of my own. At any rate, in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I (now) believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was well proofread, except for occasional garbled numbers in the citations, which I marked with a bullet like this;º the few other typographical errors are trivial, and marked therefore merely with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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Since I know of no ancient depiction of the Lupercalia, and modern depictions online are either inaccurate or prurient or usually both, it took a lot of digging to find a reasonable icon for this part of my site. I finally found the more or less acceptable detail you see in the icon above, from the following uncropped and unedited lithograph:

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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