Ahhay and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr.

Rianna Evans, Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History at Latrobe University.

This is episode C, X, X, X V, Lupecalia.

That's right, the middle of February is the festival of the Lupecalia.

The time of the year where you smear yourself in the blood of a sacrifice, strip off

your toga, take a shaggy thong and run naked around the streets of Rome slapping women

fertile? That can't be right? Okay, dress code

enforceable. Here's Rianna Evans to make sense of all this. The Lupecalia is a festival in February, celebrated on the 15th of February,

and it seems to be dedicated to cleansing the city and encouraging and celebrating fertility.

So we're sort of cleansing of evil spirits with a view apparently to increasing the fertility of Roman women.

This is a spring cleaning of the city. Maybe, yeah. the February comes from, which you'll see especially if you read of its

Fasty, the second book on February. But there's a lot of people who

connect it to a word that means purification or purging February. It's also connected to fever. So maybe you

want to purify the fever out of people as well. Yeah. Ovid he says it's an Etruscan

word for purging.

I have to say he might be right, but it does seem like the default position for where

we don't know where a word comes from, we don't know where a ritual comes from. We got it from the

Etrusans who used to rule Rome back in the way, way, way back from of its

point of view. There seemed to be connections to a kind of pastoral lifestyle, so to shepherds and goat herds.

And that is partly through the fact that it's celebrated at a spot connected with Romulus and Remus.

So Romulus the founder of the city, you remember they're supposed to have had this upbringing,

...