Saturnalia

Saturnalia was the Roman year's great release. Held at the Temple of Saturn in the Forum from 17 December, it began with public sacrifice and a banquet and then spilled into days of private feasting that Augustus fixed at three and later custom stretched toward seven. What made it memorable was inversion: the strict hierarchy of Roman society was turned upside down, so that slaves dined first and were waited on by their masters, spoke freely, and gambled openly, while everyone put off the formal toga for colourful dinner clothes and the pilleus, the felt cap that marked a freed slave. Each household chose a mock king, the Saturnalicius princeps, whose absurd commands were obeyed for the day.

People exchanged gifts, above all wax tapers (cerei) and little clay dolls (sigillaria), and greeted one another with io Saturnalia. Roman writers read the festival as a yearly re-enactment of the lost Golden Age, when Saturn ruled and no one owned slaves or property. Its midwinter timing, gift-giving, licence, and candlelight have long invited comparison with later December celebrations, though how much passed directly into them is debated.

Saturnalia took its name and its centre from the god Saturn, an ancient Italian deity of sowing and agriculture whose temple stood at the foot of the Capitoline Hill on the edge of the Forum and served as the treasury of the Roman state. The festival opened at that temple with a public sacrifice performed, unusually, in the Greek rite with the head uncovered, followed by a great public banquet, the convivium publicum.

A striking detail of the cult was that the woollen bonds ordinarily tying the feet of Saturn's cult-statue were loosened for the festival, a symbolic freeing of the god that matched the loosening of ordinary rules among his worshippers. Originally a single day on 17 December, the celebration expanded in practice: the emperor Augustus is said to have fixed the official holiday at three days, while custom and later emperors stretched the merrymaking toward five or seven, making it the longest and most beloved release of the Roman winter.

Roman writers understood Saturnalia as a yearly return to the lost Golden Age, the reign of Saturn when, in the myth, there was no slavery, no property, and no toil, so that the festival's inversions, slaves feasting as equals, masters serving, hierarchy suspended, briefly re-enacted a paradise of primal equality. Its midwinter timing, its exchange of gifts, its candlelight, and its licence have long invited comparison with later December celebrations, above all Christmas, and it is sometimes claimed that Christian festivity simply took over the Roman feast.

Historians urge caution here. Saturnalia, the Kalends of January, and the birthday of Sol Invictus all clustered in late December, and Christmas grew up amid that cluster, but a shared season and a shared taste for gifts and lights do not prove direct borrowing of any one custom from any one feast. The atmosphere of Roman midwinter surely coloured what came after; the details of descent are far harder to trace than popular accounts suggest.