The Lupercalia were a time of purification and religious celebration. As with the rest of the month of February, the object of much of the ceremony was the remembrance and honor of deceased ancestors, as well as the celebration of fertility and the coming Spring. Luper relates to lupus, or the wolf which popular myth held had reared Romulus and Remus
     The rites of this day included the sacrifice of a goat or a dog at the cave-grotto known as the Lupercal. With the sacrificial blood wiped across their foreheads, the youth partaking in this ceremony would then run the circumference of the Palatine hill, perhaps about 5K, tracing the traditional route of the city boundary traced by Romulus the day he founded Rome. In the process, girls who approached the runners would be brushed or splattered with the februa, thongs of sacrificial goatskin, presumably bloody, symbolically blessing them with fertility. Red is the color of the day as it is with Valentine's Day, the day invented to replace the Lupercalia. Fertility and sexuality were likewise replaced with the puritanical pipedream of sexless Love.
     This was the day on which, in 44 BC, Mark Antony offered Julius Caesar the crown of Rome, which he refused.

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