"Werewolves" The most studied ancient Roman festival is the Lupercalia, for reasons that will become clear. By the late Republic, the festival was understood as a purification ritual for the protection of the city of Rome, but certain aspects give it the flavor of an initiation instead. The priesthood, the Luperci, which conducted the Lupercalia, was composed of two colleges from two patricians gens, the Quinctia & the Fabia. They met in a grotto supposed to be the place where the she-wolf suckled Romulus & Remus, sacrificed a goat & a dog, used the sacrificial blade to wipe blood on two Luperci, & then cleaned them with wool soaked in milk. The Luperci then laughed. The Luperci made strips from the goat's hide, & ran around the perimeter of the Palatine hill nearly naked, with wolfskins on (the Augustan reforms may have added loincloths), whipping women with the goatskin thongs, returning to the grotto after their circuit run was complete. The antiquarian Varro wrote that the Luperci's run traced the boundary of the antiquum oppidum Palatinum, when the city of Rome itself was confined to just the Palatine Hill. The Palatine was occupied by clusters of huts from the early Iron Age in the late 10th & 9th centuries BC, & so were other hills in what would become Rome—the Capitoline, Esquiline, etc. Some archaeologists see a proto-urban center forming across these villages already, but some date a recognizable Palatine 'town' to the 8th c. In 1988, Andrea Carandini discovered a clay-&-timber wall built on virgin soil on the north slope of the Palatine dating to the early 8th century, around the time of Rome's legendary foundation in 753 BC. It's unclear what the function of the wall was—the remains are just ankle-high—& it could be something as simple as a terrace, not a defensive or ceremonial boundary. The other really archaic aspect of the ritual is the dog sacrifice, an uncanny echo of the Bronze Age steppe wolf & dog sacrifices discovered by David Anthony at Krasnosamarskoe on the Russian steppe. Anthony didn't hesitate to describe the midwinter dog sacrifice as an 'initiation'—the canines were butchered & eaten in a way that differed materially from the normal diets & cooking of the broader culture. Even in ancient Rome, the ritual actions of the Lupercalia seemed intended to deliberately contrast with the taboos & regulations surrounding the flamen Dialis or priest of Jupiter (who couldn't touch dogs, appear naked, etc). In that context, the Lupercalia resembles a remembrance of the founding of Rome by a Männerbünde-wolfpack, youths who took on the aspect of the wolf to run free, outside the city, & take brides & cattle. More recent scholars have read the Lupercalia alongside similar Vedic rituals. But does that make sense for an 8th c BC founding of the city? Were Indo-European wolfpack warbands really running around Latium like that? The steppe genes associated with the Latins arrived in central Italy in roughly 1,700 to 1,600 BC, 800 years before. What's odd is that the Etruscans (speaking a non-IE language) have about the same steppe ancestry as the Latins, & are descended from the same material culture complex, the proto-Villanovan. It's almost as if IE speakers & steppe gene carriers came into Italy, merged with the population, Etruscans kept their old language, but the Latins didn't. & of course the linguistic evidence only dates from later--inscriptions from the 7th & 6th centuries. To further complicate things, let's remember the basic aristocratic paradigm from Costin Alamariu's _Selective Breeding & the Birth of Philosophy_: a savvy, cruel race of nomadic pastoralists conquers a community of sedentary agriculturalists & installs themselves as aristocrats, understanding the power of their own breeding & blood through an analogy to the livestock they rear. The 'laws of nature' embodied by the aristocrats stand in contrast to the mores, nomos, & wisdom of the elders that govern the farmers. Alamariu argues that the Greeks invented philosophy as a way to encode & defend the traditional aristocratic teachings about nature in a democratic age. So how are we to understand the Roman patriciate--which according to Fustel de Coulanges was defined by its monopoly of priesthoods in certain state cults? According to Coulanges, the patricians were the men descended from the ancestor who had founded the cult. They alone had the right to recite the prayers & touch the sacred objects, & that right passed in the blood. A plebeian, on his account, was not a poorer citizen, but just a man outside the religion of the family & outside the religion of the city, without sacra & forbidden the rites. The 'elders', the 'fathers' who held a monopoly over access to the gods, seem more like the oppressive, suffocating voice of the ancestors than the disruptive warband, & so the Lupercalia encodes a transition rather than just a memory of a founding—perhaps a change from anarchic warrior to pious priest. The Lupercalia then as a kind of ritual containment, a frozen commemoration, frieze-like, of a nearly forgotten style of manhood, seems to bridge this contradiction. Maybe it's even a warning about the dangerous of such unbridled, overweening spirit. One of the great legends of the Fabii (one of the two gens permitted to celebrate Lupercalia) suggests we could be on the right track here. Livy tells the story about how after seven successive consulships, the Fabii wanted to take over full responsibility for defending Rome against the Veientes, but were lured into a trap chasing cattle across fields, & were nearly destroyed at the Battle of the Cremera in 477 BC... 306 Fabii died, & a single Fabius lived to tell the tale... that anecdote seems to be a warning about vestigial aristocratic impulses to take over the state, monopolize warmaking, & form clannish berserker warbands rather than disciplined armies of the Roman state. In other words, some of the most powerful rituals & myths of early Rome seem to be more about suppressing aristocratic vitality rather than leveraging it... the Roman state wanted masses of disciplined farmer-soldiers, not recklessly exuberant & superhumanly brilliant aristocrats... & I think we will have to look elsewhere than even the founding of Rome for the terrible wolfpack.