Saturn is one of the oldest gods of Rome, a deity of seed-sowing and agriculture whose very name the Romans linked to satus, sowing. But the memory attached to him reached back further than farming: he was said to have reigned in Italy in a lost age of peace and plenty, when the earth gave its fruits without labour and there was no war, slavery or private property. This was the Latin Golden Age, the Saturnia regna, and the land of Latium was even called Saturnia in his honour. Through his identification with the Greek Kronos, whom Zeus overthrew, Saturn was imagined as an exiled king who had come to Italy and taught its people the arts of settled life before vanishing.
The cult statue of Saturn in his Roman temple was shown veiled, capite velato in the old Roman fashion, holding a curved sickle or harpe, and its feet were bound year-round with woollen fetters that were ceremonially loosened only during the Saturnalia itself, a vivid image of the god's own liberation echoing the festival's temporary release of ordinary social bonds; the writer Macrobius, in the fifth century CE, preserves this detail along with much of what is known about the festival's customs. Saturn's temple at the western end of the Roman Forum, traditionally dated to the earliest years of the Republic, was rebuilt more than once, and the eight surviving Ionic columns of its final restoration remain among the most recognisable ruins of the Forum today.