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Roman festivals were a mixture of public holiday and religious ritual. One of the oldest  was a fertility rite called the Lupercalia, which was celebrated every year on February 15.

The celebrations began with the ritual sacrifice of goats and a dog at the Lupercal,a cave on Rome’s chief hill, the Palatine, in  which Romulus and Remus,the legendary founders of Rome, were reputedly suckled by a she-wolf.

Two youths, naked except for leather girdles, were smeared with the blood from the sacrifices and then ran around the Palatine Hill, carrying thongs cut from the goats’s skins. By striking any woman they passed with the thongs, the runners were thought to confer the gift of fertility.

This particular ceremony was known as februa (”purification”). It is from this that the name of the second month of the year is derived.

VIRGIN PRIESTESSES

One of the chief rituals in the worship  of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, was  keeping a fire burning in her circular temple. This fire was allowed to go out  only once a year, on March 1, the Roman New Year’s Day.

Tending the fire was the responsibility of six priestesses, the vestal virgins. These were girls of noble birth, who were recruited between the ages of 6 and 10 and remained  in the service of the goddess for 30 years. They swore to remain chaste during that time, though at the end of it they could leave their order to marry if they wished.

Discipline could be severe. For even minor offenses a vestal was liable  to be flogged, but if she broke her oath of chastity a worse fate lay in store. She would be taken to an underground room beneath a mound near  one of the city gates. There, she was given a bed, a lamb, and some food. The entrance to the mound was then closed and covered with earth , and the unfortunate vestal was left, in theory, to starve to death. In some cases, however, condemned vestals were secretly released from their  underground tombs, perhaps by their families or lovers.