 Their foreheads were anointed with blood from the sacrificial knife, then wiped clean with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and/or laugh.The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs (known as "") from the flayed skin of the animal, and ran with these, naked or near-naked, along the old Palatine boundary, in an anticlockwise direction around the hill.In Plutarch's description of the Lupercalia, written during the early Empire,
...many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.