The sacrifice of animals was a central element in most of these rituals, which otherwise were extraordinarily varied. Some were so outlandish that they undermine better than anything else the modern stereotype of the Romans as stuffy and sedate: at the festival of Lupercalia in February, for example, naked young men ran round the city whipping any women they met (this is the festival that the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar re-creates). In general, it was a religion of doing, not believing.
