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Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.
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We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events. Dear male listeners, have you ever felt the urge to get together with your friends and take off all of your clothes and. And run round the city completely stark
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A
naked and as you do, whip whoever you meet, preferably women with a bit of skin or a thong taken from a sacrificed goat?
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B
I sincerely hope that the answer is no. But if you have ever had those thoughts, or indeed done it, you may have been celebrating the Roman festival of Lupercalia without even knowing it.
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A
The Lupercalia took place on the 15th of February, and I want to say absolutely for definite now at the beginning. It has nothing to do with modern Valentine's Day on 14 February. Howling through the streets with a pack of naked mates has no overlap with dinner for two and some red roses.
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B
In fact, Lupercalia was so weird that even the Romans themselves were really quite confused by is. However, it's definitely the absolute antidote to the idea of the Romans as kind of stuffy, buttoned up old men wearing togas. And I guess in previous episodes, Mary, we have asked what's underneath the toga? And today we are definitely finding out for real.
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Yep. And we're asking, what on earth was the Lupercalia? What does it tell us about the Romans? And what, at the end of the day, does it tell us about how we ever understand rituals like this? This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
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B
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this week, picking up a suggestion of our listener, Peter Raelik. Thank you, Peter. Who's afraid of Lupercalia.
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To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or or Hitler.
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C
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village,
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a Rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
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From Empire, the Goal Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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And I'm William DuranPaul.
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In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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Subscribe to Empire Wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.
- [04:31]
B
Right, Mary, the only cultural connection I have for this really peculiar festival that to be honest, I knew very little about till I started reading up for this episode is Shakespeare, because there is a scene in Julius Caesar that, you know, listeners may be familiar with. Also there's a scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's, it's sort of, it's before the assassination of Caesar. It's sort of the Beware the Ides of March part. So Mark Anthony is one of these Luperchi.
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A
Yes.
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B
Is that how I should say it, Mary? These naked runners.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Who either give their name to the festival. Luperchi, Lupercalia. Or take their name from the festival. I mean, what's interesting, I think, to say at this point is this is isn't the festival of a God in the way that quite a lot of them are. It's not like the Saturnalia festival of Saturn. So we're in a different ball game here. But Mark Anthony, Caesar's right hand man and going to be Caesar's huge defender after the assassination in this year. And it's 44 BC, it's just a few weeks before the assassination of Caesar. Mark Antony is one of the naked runners. It's important in the plot of Julius Caesar. Various reasons. I mean, partly because of Caesar's wife, isn't it?
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B
Yes. So Caesar tells his wife Calpurnia to make sure that she's sort of in pole position to get thrashed by Anthony's thong. So part of this, it's so weird part of this is that being beaten by the special thong would help you conceive. And Caesar is worried that, you know, Calpurnia isn't getting pregnant and giving him an heir, which is, you know, typical. It must be the woman's fault if there's no conception. Anyway, side Note so Caesar says, you know, stand you directly in Antonius's way when he doth run his course and all of that. The other extraordinary and perhaps even more kind of resonant moment is that in the middle of the ceremony we hear, I mean, we don't see all these naked men, obviously. We learn that in the middle of all these shenanigans, the naked Mark Anthony has offered Caesar a royal crown, which, by the way, is a terrible, terrible omen of Caesar's ambitions. Because, you know, being a king in Rome is absolutely taboo. We got rid of those kings centuries ago. Kingship is tantamount to tyranny. But Mark Antony, in this strange moment in the middle of this very topsy turvy, possibly transgressive carnivalesque festival, offers him this crown. And Caesar refuses. But it still feels an incredibly loaded moment. Right, doesn't it?
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A
Yeah. Cause in a sense, the whole play kicks off with the idea that that Caesar is becoming a king, that Caesar is taking away Roman liberty. And you have this sort of. The Lupercalia provides that kind of ambivalent moment at the beginning. Caesar does say, no, thank you to having a crown and to becoming a king. But it's raised horribly the possibility that that might be exactly what he wants. You know, this is all. That bit is all reported. You know, I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown. Yes. And as I told you, he put it by once and he puts it by twice. He says, no, thank you. But something. Some of them are just stuck on this.
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B
And Shakespeare wasn't making this totally up, was he? This is one of the moments where Shakespeare has been, with his lovely grammar school education, has actually been reading some Roman sources. And this is sort of the. This is a reflection of Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar, isn't it, Mary?
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A
Yeah, yeah. I think Shakespeare. We don't know how much Greek Shakespeare knew, but we're told very little. It's all Latin in middle Greek, but there's an English translation of Plutarch's Lives, very popular at this moment. And in Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar, which was one of Shakespeare's, clearly one of Shakespeare's main sources for the history of this play, this moment is actually recounted, originally written in the 2nd century AD, and there are other accounts of it, but likewise in Plutarch, just as in Shakespeare, it's deeply ambivalent. We can't quite tell whether Caesar wanted to accept the crown or not. And there's the crowd roar. But you don't Know whether they're roaring to encourage Caesar to take the crown or to praise him enthusiastically for having said no. I mean, it's absolutely. It's a key moment of the path in Rome to autocracy, bizarrely marked out by Julius Caesar refusing the mark of kingship.
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B
So interesting. And even though Plutarch was writing a century on or so, there's an almost contemporary account of this from Cicero, the orator, who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar and Antony. And okay, he writes this description of the moment whilst launching an incredibly full frontal, pun intended attack on Mark Antony. But he describes this moment in passing, just a little reference, but he describes this very heady description of Anthony as naked, as drunk, as kind of drowning in perfume, urging the groaning people of Rome on towards servitude. So we can be pretty sure that this actually did happen, right?
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A
Yeah, something like this. And this is 424bc. And I think what's kind of strange in a way is that if you pay very close attention to Shakespeare's text, you see that it is happening at the Lupercalia a little bit. But it's perfectly easy to read or watch Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and never see that the kind of. The key context at the beginning of the play in is this one particular festival, which is one reason for having a bit of a look at it. Stepping back and asking, what actually was this festival? You know, runners, flagellation, crowns, whatever, leave that aside. What happened at this festival and what were they doing Now? I think that we saw some of the kind of, let's say, challenges, not problems of piecing together what happened at a Roman festival. When we looked at the Saturnalia that in Saturnalia, you know an awful lot about some bits of it and not much about others. And what you always have to do, and it's a very dodgy procedure, what you always have to do with Roman festivals is kind of search out for when Roman writers mention them, extract all the bits of info that you seem to get, the little factoids, and then try to put them together to make some kind of coherent whole. And it is always, absolutely always, it's the classic example of the jigsaw puzzle with the missing pieces, because you never can quite do that. And there are all kinds of questions that I think make it very hard to do that, which is, did this festival ever change? Were some bits there from the beginning? Did they always do this? Et cetera, et cetera. So actually saying what happened at any individual Roman festival has always got several question marks above it but the Lupercalia, and it's partly because of this moment in 44 BCE, I suppose the Lupercalia is one of the better document. We have more little jigsaw puzzle pieces for the Lupercalia than we have for most. And we've already seen some of the. The big. The big moments in this festival. The idea of whipping going through the city, these young men naked, whipping, those they come across, especially the women. There are a few more bits to add around that kind of central focus. I mean, one of which is we know where it started. We got this running. Well, we know what the. We know what the starting line was in the running, which, which is a cave on the Palatine Hill, one of the. The hills in the center of the Rome where the Roman palace in due course was. And it's the cave where Romulus and Remus, one of the mythical founders of Rome, pair of mythical founders, was supposedly suckled by. By the wolf. And it was also the place, and this is not entirely consistent with that, where there was a fig tree in the roots of which Romulus and Remus, when they were exposed by their wicked uncle, got stuck. So they didn't get drowned in the river and then they were found by the wolf. The Latin word for wolf is lupa. And there is something very wolfy about this festival. Whatever Lupercalia means, whatever the Lupercal means, which is the cave that Romulus and Remus were, let's say, found in, there's a wolf. There's a connection with the wolf. Now, I have to say, at this point, I don't think we know exactly where this cave of the Lupercal was. Archaeologists every 10 years or so claim to have found it. Some of these discoveries may be right, but there's never enough really to say
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B
it's sort of positioned. I think Plutarch says it's on the slopes of the Palestine, doesn't he? And that's the hill that overlooks the Circus Maximus. If you've ever been to Rome, there's the massive Circus Maximus. There's a hill rising up to its side, and the Lupercal's somehow supposed to face over that. The confusing thing to me about this positioning is that if Romulus and Remus are supposed to get caught in the branches of a fig tree on their way to being drowned in the Tiber. The Tiber's quite a long way away. It feels like a really, really peculiar topography. But that's the stories like Romis and Remus are exposed, you know, left to die by their great uncle, because there's a prophecy saying that they're going to overthrow him. This is the usual. The usual story. And then they're basically rescued by this wolf. Maybe this wolf has something to do with this cave and they're suckled in it. And that's this sort of starting point of the Lupercalia.
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A
Yeah, it's a kind of. It's a hugely resonant place in Rome because in. In some ways, if you go along with that version of the myth, that's where Rome starts, really. And you can still see it, you can still go into the Lupercal, the cave in the second century ce, the third century.
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B
It's.
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A
It's a kind of. It's a heritage monument and it's where this festival starts from. And it's where these groups of naked men, some people say they do wear a belt, actually, so very, very scantily clad or naked, where they start their running from. And it's. We don't know how many of them, they're divided into different groups. And it's here that they sacrifice the goat and they cut off the skin which gives them the thongs to whip the people they meet. There are some other details here which kind of make it sound even weirder. It's said that they get two of the young boys who perhaps are members of these groups of whippers, and after they've done the sacrifice, they get the knife that had gone into the goat and they smear blood on the foreheads of these, this pair of boys. They then take some milk and they wipe the blood off. And then they say the boys have to laugh. Right.
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B
Well, it's getting weirder and weirder. I just cannot get my head around it. It's so peculiar. But carry on, let's just get more into. Entrenched into this oddness.
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A
Well, you've got to add in here somewhere what other Roman writers say. They also sacrifice a dog, by the way, quite. When they sacrifice the dog. Not entirely clear. But after this, at some point after this, we get into the running around. They run around the city, or. And this turns out to be quite a crucial point of disagreement, they run up and down one of the streets of the city doing their whipping with the idea that this is very good for the fertility of any woman. Just. They don't just whip women, but it's very good for women's fertility to get whipped. How it all ends, not very clear. I mean, in my view, most Roman rituals end with a good. A good banquet A good meal. Somehow, you know, that that seems like a good way of ending the Lupercalia. Though Plutarch does suggest that actually they have the meal before they do the whipping.
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B
It's very, very strange and it feels like, I would love to know how transgressive it really is, you know, if we can imaginatively place ourselves at some point on the slopes of the Peloton or wherever the heck this is happening. You know, women being whips. I mean, like, I almost want to know how serious this whipping is or whether it's playful, whether it's symbolic. We don't really know this. That sort of vivid image of Anthony, admittedly, you know, described by Cicero, who hated Anthony, but of this sort of drunken figure drenched in perfume and naked, that makes it feel like it's a very sort of something is happening, really out of the run of the ordinary, serious life of Rome. And one thing we do know, Mary, isn't it, is that Augustus, the Emperor Augustus, sort of tidied it up and regulated the festival a bit and he sort of, he revives it, which is something he loves to do with old seeming rituals. It sort of entrenches it and revives it, but at the same time we think he sort of narrows it down a bit. He. This is Suetonius, writes his biographer, that he banned prepubescent boys from taking part in it, which in itself is quite resonant, you know, like this feels like it's unsuitable in some way or in some way for young boys to take part in it.
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A
That's right. And it's clear too that there is a bit of a historical story here that we are told that this ritual doesn't always remain the same. It's a bit of a cliche to say that the first emperor, Augustus, cleans it up and kind of, kind of properly establishes it. It's a bit of a cliche because that's what Augustus is supposed to do, kind of across the piste, really, but it reminds us that it might not always be the same. And another bit of. Another factoid to suggest change is that we're told that Julius Caesar himself, just before Augustus, he had added an extra group of runners, an extra group of looperke, who he called the Giuliani, sort of after his own family. So we've got. We can sniff some ideas of change, possibly, you know, it going into abeyance a bit, being revived, but it's quite hard to pin those down, I think.
- [21:55]
B
So we're getting a sense, Mary, of what happened Ish. Up to a point. But in a way, I think the more interesting question, Mary, which I really want us to tackle, I'm really going to make you tackle after the break. You are the great expert on Roman religion, is what on earth was this thing for?
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A
Yeah. What does it all mean? What on earth are they doing this for? What's he say? Right. We'll come back after a break and we'll try to get our teeth into that a little bit. Okay?
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B
Okay. Mary, can you tell me something about the nature of these rituals? Like what do you have a sense of what purpose they are fulfilling in the city of Rome for the culture, for the religion of Rome?
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A
But it's a tough one. And we said at the start that it's quite hard to piece together exactly what happens at this ritual or most other Roman religious rituals. It's even harder to give an explanation for it. And that relates, I think we'll see, to a bigger question which we would confront actually within our own culture of what is ritual? For how many explanations of it are there? Is there a single right version of why we do these rituals? And how do you ever pin that down? Now, that would be the case with Christmas. I mean, we could, you know, a lot of people would say, look, there's a story here, there is a story about the birth of Jesus. But anyone who said now that Christmas was only about that, they'd be wrong. You know, it's about family, it's about
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B
shopping.
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A
Shopping, consumerism gone crazy. Yeah. You know, you name it. Imagine, kind of imagine trying to piece together a Christmas template from the kind of evidence we might get 2000 years hence. You know, and the same would be true of something like, you know, Notting Hill Carnival. I mean, what is the meaning of Notting Hill Carnival? Now, we need to keep those kind of those very big questions in our mind before we get too confident that we know the answer to why they do the Lupercalia. And I mean, I think it's not just that there is no straightforward answer for us, but the Roman writers themselves, who talk quite a lot about it, they didn't have a straightforward answer either, and they disagreed about what this festival was all about.
- [25:06]
B
So one of the things I found really fascinating about this is just how contradictory these explanations are and how all the Romans who talk about all the Romans that we have, who talk about the origins of Lupercalia go right back into Roman, even pre Roman mythology and like, into the misty, misty, misty past. And sometimes it has a sort of, well, to The Romans who are writing about it, you know, the late Republic and onwards, it has a kind of rustic vibe. They think it has a kind of rustic origin, sort of pre. Something to something woody, something. Something rural, predating the city, predating social organization. And I think of it, the poet of the first century C.E. writes rather wonderfully, but again, sort of possibly slightly obscurely, about Lupercalia. And he associates it with Faunus, who's this rustic God, a kind of Roman version of Pan, who he says was imported to Italy by Evander, this precursor to Rome, who came from Arcadia. We met him in our Origins of Rome episode. So all of that, but there are kind of other resonances. There's a lot of kind of weird etymology going on when people write about. When Romans write about Lupercalia, the historian Livy connects it to this God, Inuus, who no one knows anything about, but his name means the one who penetrates, the one who goes in, which seems to have this sort of fertility vibe.
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A
Fertility vibe. Think the thongs, think the women, think a God of kind of going in penetration. You know, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's a very strong sense in which most of these writers, and I don't think we should imagine that they really know anything that we don't know, but what they're doing is that they're constantly push. They're pushing it back to pre city, to rustic Roman. And you can see what. You can see what their reasoning is, honestly, because Lupercalia, in some sense, that name with the loop bit, that means something like a festival to do with wolves and. Or a wolf. And then it starts out from the cave that people said was where Romulus and Remus had been found by the wolf. But they have all kinds of ways of then kind of adding flesh to those. Those bones. They do it in. In different ways and they try to kind of get into the story, some of the. The weirder bits of the ritual. They try to make that kind of mythical story carry some of the. The ritual oddities. I mean, there's.
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B
Oh, I see what you're saying. They kind of make the myth fit what they actually do.
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A
Yes. And they. Yes. Or they. They make a link. They somehow try to say more of it than just that basic bare bones. More of it is to do with this early myth than you realise. I mean, it's great. I think that Plutarch quotes some earlier antiquarian whose writing doesn't survive homing in, as you would on this very Odd spit where these two young boys have blood put on their forehead, then it's wiped off with milk. Right. Now, challenge to every antiquarian, particularly Roman ones. They. I mean, actually Roman antiquarians really got off on this sort of stuff. This is what they talked about at dinner. This was really. This was their. Their bread and butter and they can be very ingenious. And so this antiquarian is supposed to have said, ah, this is about celebrating the victory of Romulus and Remus at some very early point, before Romulus has kind of found the city, when they have a victory over their own local enemies. Before Rome was Rome. And there's symbolism here. That blood, that's the symbol of the danger that these founders of Rome were in. And milk, well, that's the symbol of the suckling, the wolf who suckled them, who therefore kind of allowed Rome to. Yeah, get launched. Now, this is called my bluff.
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B
This is cool. My bluff. Antiquarianism, isn't it? This is like. This is. Make it up and see whether it sticks or to be kinder. It's speculative. Speculative to say the least. One of the things we. We. One of the elements of the ritual, as far as we know, was this sacrifice of a dog. How did. How did they. How did they account for that one? Because we've got wolves and we've got dogs. We've got goats as well. Everything's a little bit congested.
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A
Let me tell you, Charlotte, you may not know this, but our Roman antiquarians did. Dogs are the enemies of wolves. So in a festival about celebrating, in the sense, you know, the. The good offices of the she wolf who suckled the twins, well, we put to death a dog. Now, don't ask why we put to death a goat, Right. You know, these antiquarians, I think, as oftener, they're a bit batty, but they're not stupid. And they're doing really what we're doing and they're looking at these things and they're saying, how do we possibly make sense of this? And so they do try to kind of fit all the bits together. And sometimes they do take a kind of higher ground. Instead of always just tying it into particular stories, they try to think more generally, generally. And one way they go is to say, aha. Do you know what this is? It's a festival at some level. Put Romulus and Remus out of your mind for a minute. It's a festival of purification. Now, it happens in February and the name of the month, February, which we've inherited from The Romans, that means purification. What do dogs do? Ah, I think dogs. Dogs are often associated, certainly in Greek religion, with purification. So maybe what's going on here, if you go to a higher plane, is that the city is being purified, possibly against some kind of malign influence of the dead. That's all a bit murky. And possibly it's also celebrating the idea that the purified city needs fertility, hence the thongs and the women to go on flourishing.
- [32:43]
B
I think one thing that is fascinating to me also, Mary, is that this is a ritual rooted in place, which is why the Notting Hill carnival, which you mentioned earlier, seems oddly apposite. Even though Notting Hill Carnival's a very recent ritual, it is something that happens in a particular place.
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A
I think that is going to be where we're going to, where we're going to move to. You know, I think before we do that, I mean, I ought to take this opportunity to be not wholly complimentary about the modern scholars who've come in here and on the back of the ancient scholars and have done much the same honestly, with, with this. And they, they, they don't believe in these myths. So what they do is they always go to the overarchingness of it and, and they're very keen, like some ancients, on, on purification. They catch the Romans, what they think was running around the city, and then they go to kind of medieval beating of the bound ceremony, which kind of defines and purifies the village or the town. And, you know, they pile all their energy in on that. They have to ignore the. Some bits of evidence which say that the runners didn't go around the city, that they went up and down one single street, and that doesn't fit with the beating of the bands. But I think that they're very much piggybacking on some of the. Some of the explanations offered by ancient writers. But what modern scholars don't do, and this is where your place comes in, I think, is that they want to get beyond Romulus and Remus.
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B
They don't.
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A
They don't want to have an explanation of this, of this ceremony that requires us thinking that Romulus and Remus were suckled in this cave. They want to be kind of anthropologists who say it's all about the dead, it's all purification. You know, purification is always a good word when you're trying to be an anthropologist. You know, you say it's all about purification. Now, I think I'm. I'm going to say I think you're right about the very, very strong links to the, the layout and the topography of the city of Rome here. And I don't for a minute want to say that the Romans were right, you know, that we can go to Plutarch and say, oh, he got this right. Nor for a minute do I want to say that there is only a single explanation for this. I mean, you know, you can't, you cannot. I mean, one of the things the Roman antiquarian shows is you can't fit all this together. I think that we ought to be a bit more careful before we do that. What most modern scholars do, which is kind of throw out all this mythical stuff. Throw out. This is where Romulus and Remus.
- [35:52]
B
Romulus and Remus and Evander and all the faunus and all the, all the rustic. All the lovely rustic trees.
- [35:58]
A
That's right. And what Rome was like before Rome was Rome. I want to say, and I think that this is going to sound a bit airy fairy, but I'll try to explain it in rather, you know, better terms. But in some ways, for me, rituals like this, and there are some others are actually one of the important things they're doing is they're acting as a kind of glue which binds together the place of Rome. Rome is a place. And the myths of Rome and its history that we know now, that sounds, you know, I think that can sound a bit airy fairy, but I think I want to throw into the pot two really crucial bits of Roman culture that were, we often forget and it's very easy to overlook, that is, most Roman myth takes place in Rome. It is situated. It has a place, it's situated in Rome. And often the location of it is still visible. You know, in the imperial period, the first second century ce, you could still see these places. Now, the, the cave where the wolf found the twins is one very obvious example, but, you know, there are plenty of others that, for example, if you went up onto the top of the Palatine, that hill in the center of Rome, at any point in Roman history, you would still see the hut in which Romulus was supposed to have lived, the hut of Romulus. Now, it presumably had been much rebuilt over the centuries, but Romulus footprint, as it were, is still there. And when Roman orators get up and speak, you know, often the bits we kind of flip over quite quickly when we're reading what they have to say, they are saying, I am standing in the place where Romulus stood when whatever we think, oh, yeah, you know, blah, blah, but that idea is really important now. You add that to another fact, which is that Roman religious rituals, they have a whole calendar of them, you know, dozens of them. Most of them never take place anywhere but Rome. You know, a few do. Roman army bases might have a bit of Saturnalia fun, et cetera, et cetera. And the Lupercalia does seem to have been a bit celebrated in Constantinople, when Constantinople much later becomes the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. But the key is, rituals don't spread with the Roman Empire. They. You could basically, you could only do most of these rituals in Rome itself, in the place where they were supposed to have happened. The Lupercalia makes no sense in Colchester. Right. And you don't do it there. So what you've got is you've got a traditional religion, traditional state official religion of Rome, which is bound up in where Rome is, what happened there. And it's that, I think, that we're seeing in not only this, but we could look at some other rituals where you'd find similar things, that this is how we enact our connection, how we actually make real. Oh, that's our Roman connection with our myth and our history and our past and our place and where we are.
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B
I love this. I love this. This kind of idea that Rome is a performance space almost, in which the past, the present and the deeply, deeply distant, misty origins of the city all come together. And that's what makes the city. It's a sort of place of enactment and it can only happen there. And this is what makes. It's these weird festivals that make Rome Rome.
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A
They make Rome Rome and they make the Romans, Romans. And so what they are doing is they are kind of construct.
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B
They are.
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A
This is going to sound, I think, perhaps off puttingly trendy. They're constructing Roman identity, is what some people might say that we do this because we have always done it this way in this place, et cetera, et cetera. And that's why your reference just now to Notting Hill, I think, is important, because I think we can understand that whatever the Notting Hill carnival means in inverted commas, it belongs in Notting Hill. It is a ritual of place. It's, you know, you can't do it on Shrewsbury High Street. I mean, you could do something that's a bit like it, but it's not the Notting Hill carnival.
- [41:17]
B
It's not the same. Yeah. Yes, Yes. I love this. Suddenly it's all coming into focus for me, actually, the idea of romance, this vast, performative living thing where all these time frames sort of come into the same plane. And all these actions are about the deep. I love it. Thank you, Mary. I now feel that I've got a better grip on these head spinningly weird rituals.
- [41:48]
A
There is, I mean I feel fairly confident that that's a big, you know, that's a big center of this festival. I wouldn't for a minute say it's explained everything, you know and I think you'd be going down the route of the Roman antiquarians. You wanted to fit everything else in if you said. And now I'm going to tell you how that works with the blood and the milk and the laugh. But it's about a community learning how to see and enact itself and to bridge and it's bridging myth history. And now that's what it's doing.
- [42:25]
B
And does that partly explain why it seems to go on into the Christian era, doesn't it? And we know that because there is this pamphlet, as it were, written by a guy called Dalasius who attacked the Romans who were continuing to do or revive the ceremony. This is late 5th century, so this is well into the Christian era.
- [42:53]
A
Gelasius is a. Gelasius is a Pope. Is the Pope.
- [42:57]
B
Right.
- [42:59]
A
And he does put out this, it is a slightly difficult pamphlet but it does still survive where he is exactly attacking those Romans who are still doing this ceremony, still doing the Lupercala. This is in the 490s, right? Or maybe they've revived it. That's a bit unclear and saying you've got to stop it, this is incompatible with Christianity. But what is absolutely obvious is that incompatible with Christianity or not? It is and I would say perhaps in the same sense of constructing a version of Romanness, it is still going on. Now we've got another historical development I think here because if Augustus cleaned up this ceremony, it's certainly not clean under Gelasius. One of the things he doesn't like is its lewdness and the fact now the Luperci are not upstanding young Roman men, they're actors, the people who run around the city. And we also see that it's some version of this kind of is done in the other capital of Rome, Constantinople, and that's probably some version and I think that's very much in italics is being done up till the 10th century CE.
- [44:25]
B
That's quite recent, although that does slightly contradict what we just said about it being place specific. But there's this a sense of sort of bringing Rome with you because you don't have Rome any longer.
- [44:38]
A
So you, you have to, I think you can say, looks as if it, you know, having it done in Constantinople looks as if it's. That goes against the idea of the specificity of place, but in some ways it goes with it because when you get a new capital, you make it Rome. That's. Yeah, that's what they're doing. So one of the ways of making Constantinople Rome was to implant these very place driven rituals.
- [45:09]
B
I've got one final question for you, Mary, which is, and I think I know the answer to this, but I'm gonna toss it out there anyway. Does any of this have anything to do, as it is occasionally said, to do with Valentine's Day?
- [45:25]
A
Well, we put our cards on the table at the very beginning saying, you know, no, you know, whipping women with thongs is not red roses in a nice dinner. I have to say, let me just reiterate this in case that point has got lost. Just because two festivals happen in different parts of the world at different times on not quite the same day, but nearly, it does not mean that they've got anything whatsoever to do with each other. And in this case, I promise you, this is not a proto Valentine's Day. Nuff said.
- [46:04]
B
Guys, I think enough said. Enough said for this episode as well. On that note, Mary, I'm going out to get myself whipped by some strapping naked men and I hope you're going to do the same.
- [46:18]
A
I'll give it a try.
- [46:21]
B
As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media nstantclassicspod. Bye.