We might naturally expect that this sacred wall and boundary would have its holiness and efficacy secured by an annual lustratio of the same kind as that of the farm and pagus; and so it was. We know that there was at Rome a lustral rite called Amburbium, which probably took place at the beginning of the month of purification (February); but it is for us unluckily little more than a name. Later on in the same month we find the extraordinary rite of the Lupercalia (15th), in which the pomerium is so far concerned as that the Luperci, or young men who served as priests on the occasion, ran round the ancient boundary of the Palatine settlement, girt with the skins of the victims, striking at all women who came near them with strips cut from these same skins, in order to produce fertility. But was this really a _lustratio urbis_? In my _Roman Festivals_ I treated it as such (p. 319), on the ground that Varro uses the word lustrare in alluding to it. I am now, however, disposed to think that Varro was here using the word in a general and not a technical sense, and that the object of it was not, as in the rites we have been discussing, to keep evil spirits away from the city as a whole. It seems to be a survival of some very primitive magico-religious ideas, into which I will not enter now. Certain it is that the leading feature of the true lustratio is absent from it; instead of a slow and stately procession of worshippers and victims, we have the wild running of almost naked youths, apparently personating or embodying a deity.