Valentine’s Day Had a Dark, Bloody Precursor

Every February 14, millions of people celebrate love and friendship on Valentine’s Day. In ancient Rome, passion was similarly top of mind every February 15 on Lupercalia.

The annual Roman fertility festival was held for over a thousand years. Huge crowds filled the center of Rome, where the women in attendance hoped to be struck by whips thought to improve their childbearing. The Romans also used the occasion to blow off some steam, drink heavily and be raucous.

“The streets were full for Lupercalia,” says Krešimir Vuković, the author of Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives. The main event of the day saw two sets of scantily clad male runners race through the city’s core to strike the women, who lined the streets with the masses, much like crowds at outdoor sports races do today.

Lupercalia’s proximity to Valentine’s Day has led some to suggest the Roman fete led to the modern holiday. But just how connected are the two celebrations, why did Romans believe that hitting women with straps would improve their fertility, and how did Lupercalia come to an end?

The origin of Lupercalia has been a topic of much debate, especially since Roman writing and literature began in earnest in the third century B.C. By that point, Lupercalia had been taking place for generations. As well as being a fertility ritual, the festival honored the founding of Rome. Roman lore suggests the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, started Lupercalia and were the first to run through the streets when the twin brothers were adolescents.

According to Clifford Ando, an ancient Roman historian who teaches at the University of Chicago, another origin story is that the Greek king Evander of Pallantium, who introduced writing and customs to Rome, based Lupercalia on Arcadia’s Lykaia festival. “[At] that festival, all the young boys in the area on the verge of manhood would eat a piece of meat out of [a] pot, and the one who ate the single piece of human flesh [in there] would be transformed into a wolf and have to go live in the wilderness for a year,” Ando says. After that year, he would return to his human form.

Vuković, who is an assistant professor of Greek and Latin studies at Prague’s Charles University, believes Lupercalia started off as an Indo-European rite of passage that took place before the foundation of Rome. “My hypothesis is that they had these cultural rituals in which young men identified with wolves as predators [and hunters]. It was a kind of rite of passage for these young men to transition into adulthood,” he explains. “This is the reason, I think, why the wolf is so important in Roman culture, Roman mythology [and] Roman religion.”

However the festival came to be, scholars have a slightly more concrete understanding about its events. Lupercalia began at the Lupercal cave, where, according to Roman mythology, the she-wolf Lupa is said to have nursed Romulus and Remus when the siblings were infants. The cave is in the area of Palatine Hill near the center of Rome.

Only Luperci priests would enter the cave. “We have no idea what they did there,” Vuković says. “Then they would come out. They would strip naked, though most of the representations we have show them wearing some sort of loincloth.”

Then, like most other religious festivals, a sacrifice occurred. According to Vuković, the Luperci would kill a dog and a goat. The dog was seen as the domestic counterpart of the wolf, and goats were associated with fertility in ancient Rome. “The young men were smeared with the blood of the goat on their face, before it was wiped off with a rag soaked in milk,” Ando says.

The men then ran through the streets of Rome and struck women they saw with leather straps. “Later generations, around the time of Emperor Augustus, and in the generation after told the story that… there would be a kind of magical effect [on the women who were hit] that rendered them fertile,” Ando explains. “Newly married young women, in particular, would try to stand in the path of the runners and hope to get whipped because it would provide good luck for their childbearing.”

While it was previously suggested that there was a matchmaking element to the festival, both Vuković and Ando believe there is not enough evidence to prove the Luperci ever tried to pair people together. But, Ando says, the festivities did include a barbecue where people ate the meat from the sacrificed animals.

Given the chance to attend Lupercalia, many of us might demur, but most ancient Romans felt much differently. “They think that this is a fascinating, sexy festival… It’s extremely popular,” Vuković shares. “We know it was a celebration. We know people also drank during the event. We know people had fun.”

As the centuries went on, the treatment of women during Lupercalia became much more severe. Scholars believe women initially stretched out their palms to receive the light ritual whip, but by the late antiquity period of the Roman Empire, which began in the second half of the third century A.D., “women [were] being hoisted up, and they’re beaten on their buttocks,” Vuković says. Lupercalia became a place where the Romans summoned and released their primitive urges and channeled wolves’ behavior. “The wolf is a savage animal… powerful but also very fertile,” he adds. The Romans “harness this energy and direct it towards fertility and general benefits for the community.”

Even Cicero, who died in 43 B.C., had suggested that the Lupercalia was barbaric. The Roman politician and writer told a courtroom the Luperci were “a savage, uncivilized brotherhood that precedes civilization and laws,” Vuković explains.

Yet, it was not until the end of the fourth century that Lupercalia’s prominence started dying down. Around A.D. 392, Emperor Theodosius I outlawed many traditional pagan rituals as he looked to make Nicene Christianity the Roman empire’s official religion. Lupercalia continued to take place, though the priests no longer sacrificed animals and instead poured wine out or offered a different gift to the gods, Ando explains. Other aspects of the festival’s evolution are hard to pin down. “Did the men still run around naked? I mean, who knows,” he says.

Around a century later, Pope Gelasius I criticized Lupercalia, “writing a letter to [Roman senators] saying that this is indecent, this is pagan, this is obscene,” explains Vuković. Still, it continued. The last description of Lupercalia occurs in the 490s, and the scarcity of medieval records leaves the tradition’s conclusion as baffling as its start. “We don’t actually know when the last celebration took place. We don’t know if it turned into a kind of general carnival that you have in many other places in medieval Europe.”

The close timing of Lupercalia on February 15 and Valentine’s Day on February 14 has led many people to assume the modern holiday must be linked to the Roman festival. But Vuković says there is no evidence of a connection.

“In Christian Rome, people invented this theory that Pope Gelasius… somehow managed to suppress the Lupercalia and replace it with St. Valentine,” Vuković says. “This is a complete fabrication.”

It is true that Pope Gelasius christened February 14 St. Valentine’s Day in A.D. 496 to honor the martyrdom of St. Valentine. But the day only became associated with romance centuries later. English poet Geoffrey Chaucer is credited with making St. Valentine’s Day into a romantic celebration with his poem “Parliament of Fowls,” written around the 1380s. Before then, the similarities between Valentine’s Day and Lupercalia started and ended with the calendar.

To that end, Vuković believes the middle of February was chosen for Lupercalia and the modern interpretation of Valentine’s Day for the same reason. “For the Romans, the first signs of spring appear in February, and it’s mating season for wolves. For them, [Lupercalia] already has to do with the beginning of the year,” he says. “You can find this kind of thing all over the world, the springtime association with fertility and abundance.”