But in course of time, Prof. Deubner goes on, there came to be engrafted
on this simple rite of circumambulation without reference to a deity, a
festival of the rustic god Faunus; and now there was added a sacrifice
of goats, which seem to have been his favourite victims (kids in Hor.
_Odes_, iii. 18). The _luperci_, who had formerly run round the hill
quite naked, as in many rites of the kind (see p. 491), now girt
themselves with the skins of the goats, in order to increase their
"religious force" in keeping away the wolves, with strength derived from
the victims.

But the _luperci_ also carried in their hands, in the festival as we
know it, strips of the skins of the victims, with which they struck at
women who offered themselves to the blows, in order to make them
fertile. This, Prof. Deubner thinks, was a still later accretion. Life
in a city had obliterated the original meaning of the rite--the keeping
off wolves; but a new meaning becomes attached to it, presumably growing
out of the use of the skins as magical instruments of additional force.
Here, too, Juno first appears on the scene as the deity of women, for
the strips were known as _amicula Iunonis_ (_R.F._ 321 and note). The
strips may have been substituted for something carried in the hand to
drive away the wolves; the goat, it should be noted, is prominent in the
cult of Juno, _e.g._ at Lanuvium. The mystical meaning of striking or
flogging has been sufficiently explained in this instance by Mannhardt
(_R.F._ p. 320), and is now familiar to anthropologists in other
contexts.

In the period when the fertilisation of women became the leading feature
of the rite, the State took up the popular festival, and it gained
admittance to the religious calendar, which was drawn up for the city of
the four regions (see above, Lect. IV., p. 106). The State was
represented, as we learn from Ovid, by the Flamen Dialis (_Fasti_, ii.
282).

But we still have to account for some strange detail, which has never
been satisfactorily explained in connection with the rest of the
ceremony. The runners had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the
victims, which was then wiped off with wool dipped in milk; after which,
says Plutarch (_Romulus_, 21), they were obliged to laugh. These
details, as Prof. Deubner remarks, seem very un-Roman; we have no
parallel to them in Roman ritual, and I have remarked more than once in
these lectures on the absence of the use of blood in