The last point to be noticed, the whipping with the strips of skin[1440], might have attracted little notice as a relic of antiquity in the late Republic but for the famous incident in the life of Caesar, when Antonius was one of the runners. We have it on excellent evidence, not only that the runners struck women who met them with the strips, but that they did so in order to produce fertility[1441]. Such an explanation of the object would hardly have been invented, and it tallies closely with some at least of a great number of practices of the kind which have been investigated by Mannhardt[1442]. His parallel are not indeed all either complete or convincing; but the collection is valuable for many purposes, and the general result is to show that whipping certain parts of the body with some instrument supposed to possess magic power is efficacious in driving away the powers of evil that interfere with fertilization. Whether the thing beaten be man, woman, image, or human or animal representative of the Vegetation spirit, the object is always more or less directly to quicken or restore the natural powers of reproduction; the notion being that the hostile or hindering spirit was thus driven out, or that the beating actually woke up and energized the power. The latter is perhaps a later idea, rationalized from the earlier. In any case the thongs, as part of the sacrosanct victim, were supposed to possess a special magical power[1443]; and the word applied to them, _februa_, though not meaning strictly instruments of purification in our sense of the word, may be translated _cathartic_ objects, since they had power to free from hostile influences and quicken natural forces. And those who wielded them were regarded in some at least as priests or magicians; they were naked but for the goat-skins, and probably had wreaths on their heads[1444]. Their wild and lascivious behaviour as they ran is paralleled in many ceremonies of the kind[1445]. It is singular that a festival of a character so rude and rustic should have lived on in the great city for centuries after it had become cosmopolitan and even Christian. This is one of the many results due to the religious enterprise of Augustus, who rebuilt the decayed Lupercal, and set the feast on a new footing[1446]. It continued to exist down to the year 494 A.D. when the Pope, Gelasius I, changed the day (Feb. 15) to that of the Purification of the Virgin Mary[1447]. XIII KAL. MART. (Feb. 17). NP. QUIR[INALIA]. (CAER. MAFF. FARN. PHILOC.) QUIRINO IN COLLE. (FARN. CAER.)