Source A: Ovid, Fasti 2.429-430 and 2.441-448
'For there was a time when, by a cruel fate, wives seldom gave birth to children. [Romulus and his people pray in the grove of Juno on the Esquiline Hill, and the goddess answers.] "Let a sacred he-goat go in to the Italian mothers," she said. The crowd was stunned, terrified by the puzzling words. There was an augur - his name has been lost over the long years - who had recently come as an exile from Etruria. He killed a he-goat, and the young wives, as they were told, offered their backs to be struck with strips cut from its hide. The moon was renewing her horns for the tenth time, and suddenly the husband was a father and the wife a mother.'
To what extent was the Lupercalia mainly a festival of fertility? Use Source A as a starting point and your own knowledge.
Model answer
Source A gives strong support to the view that the Lupercalia was a fertility festival. Ovid tells how, in the time of Romulus, the wives were barren until Juno's oracle ordered them to be struck with strips of a he-goat's hide; ten months later they were mothers. Plutarch confirms that in his own day women of high rank deliberately held out their hands to the running Luperci, believing that the blows helped pregnant women to give birth easily and childless women to conceive. The choice of goats as victims and the link with Faunus, or the Arcadian Pan, a god of flocks and herds, also suggest the fertility of animals as well as people.
However, there is good evidence that purification was just as important. The strips of goatskin were called februa, which Ovid says means 'means of purification', and the month of February was named after them. February was the last month of the old Roman year, and the Luperci ran round the Palatine, the boundary of Romulus' original city, as if cleansing it before the new year. The strange rite of the two youths, touched with a bloody knife and wiped with wool soaked in milk, also looks like a cleansing ritual.
The festival was also a celebration of Rome's foundation. It began at the Lupercal, where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, and Ovid explains the naked running through the story of the twins chasing cattle thieves, with the Fabii and Quinctilii as their followers. By the late Republic it was also a great public spectacle and even a political stage, when Mark Antony offered Caesar a diadem in 44 BC.
In conclusion, fertility was probably the meaning most ordinary Romans saw, and it is the one Source A stresses, but Ovid himself offers several explanations, which shows that the festival had many layers. Purification of the city and memory of its founding were at least as central, so the Lupercalia was a festival of renewal for the whole community rather than mainly a fertility rite.
Explanation
To reach Level 4 an answer must use Source A and wider knowledge to weigh fertility against other purposes (purification, the founding myth, spectacle and politics) and reach a supported judgement. Common weaknesses are retelling the ritual without linking it to the question, or ignoring the evidence of the februa and the circuit of the Palatine.
