Salvete Omnes,

According the legend, Romulus and Remus funded Rome on 21th April 753 BC. Both brothers came from the union of war god, Mars, and vestal priest Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, the king of Alba Longa who has been dethroned by his brother Amulius. This one, fearing for his power, ordered that his great-nephews be thrown in the river Tiber, at this time in spate. But the order was not applied, and the two babies were abandoned in a basket and, at last, rescued and fed up by a she-wolf, in a cave near the Tiber, in the place called « Lupercal ».

Rome cultural heritage archeologists department may have discovered the Lupercal cave during maintenance works in emperor Augustus palace, just above on the Palatine. The cave has been found after a boring was made under the palace.

Historical sources located the cave not far from it, but did not precise exactly where. It has been written, too, that Augustus would have restored the cave.

The found cave is 15 meters deep. Its walls are decorated by rich mosaïcs and shells, which seem too much important for a simple house. The archeologists are now looking for the cave way-in.

In ancient Rome, the Lupercales were a fertility yearly festival, celebrated on 15th February, in the honor of the god of the herds, Faunus Lupercus.

The rite consisted in the sacrifice of a goat, to which attended two young men. Once the goat sacrified, the priest touched the youngsters’s fronthead with the knife, and wiped it with a piece of wool dip in the milk. The young men then would run in the streets of Rome, whipping, with strips cut in the skin of the sacrified goat, all the women who said that they wanted a child.

This rite has been forbidden in 494 by Pope Gelase 1st, which replaced it by St Valentine day, in the memory of the death of Valentine 200 years before.

Sextus Apollonius Scipio