were specially concerned with the State's welfare. And
on these days, so far as we know, there was a regular ordered routine of
sacrifice and prayer, with but little trace of the barbarous or
grotesque. The ritual of the Lupercalia is almost a solitary exception.
The Luperci had their foreheads smeared with the blood of the victims,
which were goats, and then this was wiped off with wool dipped in milk;
after this they were obliged to laugh, probably as a sign that the god
(whoever he was) was in them, or that they were identified with
him.[211] They then girt themselves with the skins of the victims and
ran round the ancient pomoerium, striking at any women they met with
strips of the same victims in order to produce fertility. This was
perhaps a rite taken over from aboriginal settlers on the Palatine, and
so intimately connected with that hill that it could not be omitted from
the calendar. The ritual of the three days of Lemuria in May, when
ghosts were expelled from the house, as Ovid describes the process, by
means of beans,[212] seems also to have been a reminiscence of ideas
about the dead more primitive than those which took effect in the more
cheerful Parentalia of February: here again we may perhaps see a
concession to the popular tradition and prejudice of a primitive
population. On the other hand, the revelry of the Saturnalia in
December, of which Dr. Frazer has made so much in the second edition of
the _Golden Bough_,[213] is nothing more than the licence of the
population of a great cosmopolitan city, an out-growth, under Greek
influence, from the rude winter rejoicings of the farmer and his
_familia_; and for his conjecture that a human victim was sacrificed on
this occasion in ancient Rome there is simply no evidence whatever.
There is, indeed, not a trace of human sacrifice at Rome so long as the
_ius divinum_ was the supreme religious law of the State; in the whole
Roman literature of the Republic hardly anything of the kind is alluded
to;[214] it is only when we come to an age when the taste for bloodshed
was encouraged by the shows of the amphitheatre, and when the
blood-loving religions of the East were pressing in, that we hear of
human sacrifice, and then only from Christian writers, who would
naturally seize on anything that came to hand to hold up paganism to
derision, without inquiring into the truth or the history of the alleged
practice.[215]

Thus we may take it as highly probable that th