The connexion with the Palatine, with the wolf, and with fructification, seems to me to point very clearly in the direction of Mars and his characteristics. It would be almost more profitable if we could be sure of the sacrificing priest; but here again we are in the dark. Ovid says, ‘Flamen ad haec prisco more Dialis erat[1403]‘; but it is impossible that this priest could have been the sacrificer (though Marquardt committed himself to this), for he was expressly forbidden to touch either goat or dog[1404], which seem to have been excluded from the cult of Jupiter. Even in the case of such exceptional _piacula_ as this no doubt was, we can hardly venture without further evidence to ascribe the slaughter of the sacred animal to the great priest of the heavenly deity in whose cult it was tabooed. Plutarch says that the Luperci themselves sacrificed[1405]; and this is more probable, and is borne out by comparison with other cases in which the priest clothes himself, as the Luperci did, in the skin of the victim. It does not indeed seem certain that the two youths who thus girt themselves had also performed the sacrifice; but they represent the two collegia of Luperci, and lead the race[1406], as Romulus and Remus did in the explanatory legend. As regards the victims, there is here at least no doubt that both goat and dog were exceptional animals in sacrifice[1407], and that their use here betokens a piacular rite of unusual ‘holiness.’ Thus their offering is a mystic sacrifice, and belongs to that ‘small class of exceptional rites in which the victim was drawn from some species of animals that retained even in modern times their ancient repute of natural holiness[1408].’ It is exactly in this kind of sacrifice that we find such peculiar points of ritual as meet us in the Lupercalia. ‘The victim is sacrosanct, and the peculiar value of the ceremony lies in the operation performed on its life, whether that life is merely conveyed to the god on the altar (i. e. as in burnt-sacrifices) or is also applied to the worshippers by the sprinkling of the blood, or some other lustral ceremony[1409].’ The writer might very well have been thinking of the Lupercalia when he wrote these lines. The meaning of these rites was originally, as he states it, that the holiness of the victim means kinship to the worshippers and their god, ‘that all sacred relations and all moral obligations depend on physical unity of life, and that physical unity of life can be created or reinforced by common participation in living flesh and blood.’ We may postpone consideration of this view as applied to the Lupercalia till we have examined the remaining features of the ceremony.