SERVILIA: The calendar in ancient Rome was filled with festival days. These were religious holidays, when people wore their best clothes and performed religious rites, like animal sacrifices, to honor one of the various Roman gods. But they were also public holidays, when most people didn’t have to go to work and the government sponsored public entertainment.

RALPH: This might include dramatic performances at a theater, or chariot races in the spectacular Circus Maximus, which could seat over 150,000 people, making it larger than any stadium in the world today.

SERVILIA: The celebrations might also include gladiator fights in the colosseum, where up to 200 pairs of fighters would risk their lives in hand-to-hand combat in a single afternoon.

RALPH: The Lupercal festival celebrates the fertility of spring. Included in the rituals were goat sacrifices to the god Faunus who is half man, half goat – appropriate for the god of fertility since goats were notorious for being horny.

SERVILIA: At one point during the ceremony, several noblemen, wearing nothing but goatskins tied around their loins, would run through the crowd, striking young women with leather straps.

RALPH: According to folklore, this guaranteed that the women could get pregnant quickly. A noblewoman wanting to assure her fertility would reserve a strategic position along this course, so that she would get hit by a runner.

SERVILIA: In addition to fertility, the Lupercal festival celebrated the birth of Rome by honoring Romulus, the founder of the city. According to legend, the infant princes, Romulus and Remus, were left out in the forest to die by an evil king.

RALPH: But they were saved by a female wolf who took them to her cave and suckled them. Later Romulus founded Rome and became its first king. Upon his death, Romulus rose up into the heavens and became one of the Roman gods.

SERVILIA: By having Caesar schedule his triumphal return to Rome on the same day as the Lupercal festival, Shakespeare shows us a Caesar who might be inviting a comparison to Romulus. Perhaps, like Romulus, he wants to be seen as a king, or even as a god.