Section 3. The Roman Saturnalia.
WE have seen that many peoples have been used to observe an annual
period of license, when the customary restraints of law and morality are
thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to
extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent
which would never be allowed them in the more staid and sober course of
ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of human nature, too
often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly
at the end of the year, and are frequently associated, as I have had
occasion to point out, with one or other of the agricultural seasons,
especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all these periods
of license the one which is best known and which in modern language has
given its name to the rest, is the Saturnalia. This famous festival fell in
December, the last month of the Roman year, and was popularly supposed
to commemorate the merry reign of Saturn, the god of sowing and of
husbandry, who lived on earth long ago as a righteous and beneficent
king of Italy, drew the rude and scattered dwellers on the mountains
together, taught them to till the ground, gave them laws, and ruled in
peace. His reign was the fabled Golden Age: the earth brought forth
abundantly: no sound of war or discord troubled the happy world: no
baleful love of lucre worked like poison in the blood of the industrious and
contented peasantry. Slavery and private property were alike unknown: all
men had all things in common. At last the good god, the kindly king,
vanished suddenly; but his memory was cherished to distant ages, shrines
were reared in his honour, and many hills and high places in Italy bore his
name. Yet the bright tradition of his reign was crossed by a dark shadow:
his altars are said to have been stained with the blood of human victims,
for whom a more merciful age afterwards substituted effigies. Of this gloomy
side of the god's religion there is little or no trace in the descriptions which
ancient writers have left us of the Saturnalia. Feasting and revelry and all
the mad pursuit of pleasure are the features that seem to have especially
marked this carnival of antiquity, as it went on for seven days in the streets
and public squares and houses of ancient Rome from the seventeenth to
the twenty-third of December. 1
But no feature of the festival is more remarkable, nothing in it seems to
have struck the ancients themselves more than the license granted to
slaves at this time. The distinction between the free and the servile classes
was temporarily abolished. The slave might rail at his master, intoxicate
himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not even a word of
reproof would be administered to him for conduct which at any other
season might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death.
Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited
on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the
board cleared and dinner set for his master. So far was this inversion of
ranks carried, that each household became for a time a mimic republic in
which the high offices of state were discharged by the slaves, who gave
their orders and laid down the law as if they were indeed invested with all
the dignity of the consulship, the praetorship, and the bench. Like the pale
reflection of power thus accorded to bondsmen at the Saturnalia was the
mock kingship for which freemen cast lots at the same season. The person
on whom the lot fell enjoyed the title of king, and issued commands of a
playful and ludicrous nature to his temporary subjects. One of them he
might order to mix the wine, another to drink, another to sing, another to
dance, another to speak in his own dispraise, another to carry a flute-girl
on his back round the house. 2
Now, when we remember that the liberty allowed to slaves at this festive
season was supposed to be an imitation of the state of society in Saturn's
time, and that in general the Saturnalia passed for nothing more or less
than a temporary revival or restoration of the reign of that merry monarch,
we are tempted to surmise that the mock king who presided over the revels
may have originally represented Saturn himself. The conjecture is strongly
confirmed, if not established, by a very curious and interesting account of
the way in which the Saturnalia was celebrated by the Roman soldiers
stationed on the Danube in the reign of Maximian and Diocletian. The
account is preserved in a narrative of the martyrdom of St. Dasius, which
was unearthed from a Greek manuscript in the Paris library, and published
by Professor Franz Cumont of Ghent. Two briefer descriptions of the event
and of the custom are contained in manuscripts at Milan and Berlin; one of
them had already seen the light in an obscure volume printed at Urbino in
1727, but its importance for the history of the Roman religion, both ancient
and modern, appears to have been overlooked until Professor Cumont
drew the attention of scholars to all three narratives by publishing them
together some years ago. According to these narratives, which have all
the appearance of being authentic, and of which the longest is probably
based on official documents, the Roman soldiers at Durostorum in Lower
Moesia celebrated the Saturnalia year by year in the following manner.
Thirty days before the festival they chose by lot from amongst themselves
a young and handsome man, who was then clothed in royal attire to
resemble Saturn. Thus arrayed and attended by a multitude of soldiers he
went about in public with full license to indulge his passions and to taste of
every pleasure, however base and shameful. But if his reign was merry, it
was short and ended tragically; for when the thirty days were up and the
festival of Saturn had come, he cut his own throat on the altar of the god
whom he personated. In the year A.D. 303 the lot fell upon the Christian
soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the heathen god and soil
his last days by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his
commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly
he was beheaded, as the Christian martyrologist records with minute
accuracy, at Durostorum by the soldier John on Friday the twentieth day
of November, being the twenty-fourth day of the moon, at the fourth
hour. 3
Since this narrative was published by Professor Cumont, its historical
character, which had been doubted or denied, has received strong
confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of the cathedral
which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is preserved, among other
remarkable antiquities, a white marble sarcophagus bearing a Greek
inscription, in characters of the age of Justinian, to the following effect:
"Here lies the holy martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum." The
sarcophagus was transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the
church of San Pellegrino, under the high altar of which, as we learn from a
Latin inscription let into the masonry, the martyr's bones still repose with
those of two other saints. How long the sarcophagus was deposited in the
church of San Pellegrino, we do not know; but it is recorded to have been
there in the year 1650. We may suppose that the saint's relics were
transferred for safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries
which followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged
by successive hordes of barbarian invaders. At all events it appears
certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of the
martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a
real man, who suffered death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the early
centuries of the Christian era. Finding the narrative of the nameless
martyrologist thus established as to the principal fact recorded, namely, the
martyrdom of St. Dasius, we may reasonably accept his testimony as to the
manner and cause of the martyrdom, all the more because his narrative is
precise, circumstantial, and entirely free from the miraculous element.
Accordingly I conclude that the account which he gives of the celebration
of the Saturnalia among the Roman soldiers is trustworthy. 4
This account sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King of the
Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the winter
revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus. It seems to prove that his
business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew
whose only care was that the revelry should run high and the fun grow fast
and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the
streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far
away to the north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow. When we compare
this comic monarch of the gay, the civilised metropolis with his grim
counterpart of the rude camp on the Danube, and when we remember the
long array of similar figures, ludicrous yet tragic, who in other ages and in
other lands, wearing mock crowns and wrapped in sceptred palls, have
played their little pranks for a few brief hours or days, then passed before
their time to a violent death, we can hardly doubt that in the King of the
Saturnalia at Rome, as he is depicted by classical writers, we see only a
feeble emasculated copy of that original, whose strong features have been
fortunately preserved for us by the obscure author of the Martyrdom of St.
Dasius. In other words, the martyrologist's account of the Saturnalia agrees
so closely with the accounts of similar rites elsewhere which could not
possibly have been known to him, that the substantial accuracy of his
description may be regarded as established; and further, since the custom
of putting a mock king to death as a representative of a god cannot have
grown out of a practice of appointing him to preside over a holiday revel,
whereas the reverse may very well have happened, we are justified in
assuming that in an earlier and more barbarous age it was the universal
practice in ancient Italy, wherever the worship of Saturn prevailed, to
choose a man who played the part and enjoyed all the traditionary
privileges of Saturn for a season, and then died, whether by his own or
another's hand, whether by the knife or the fire or on the gallows-tree, in
the character of the good god who gave his life for the world. In Rome
itself and other great towns the growth of civilisation had probably
mitigated this cruel custom long before the Augustan age, and transformed
it into the innocent shape it wears in the writings of the few classical
writers who bestow a passing notice on the holiday King of the Saturnalia.
But in remoter districts the older and sterner practice may long have
survived; and even if after the unification of Italy the barbarous usage was
suppressed by the Roman government, the memory of it would be handed
down by the peasants and would tend from time to time, as still happens
with the lowest forms of superstition among ourselves, to lead to a
recrudescence of the practice, especially among the rude soldiery on the
outskirts of the empire over whom the once iron hand of Rome was
beginning to relax its grasp. 5
The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the Carnival of
modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts that
have come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not
amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is,
in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most
lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure
personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and
dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned
grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the
Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct
successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the
real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered
a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth
Night and the mediaeval Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or Lord of
Misrule are figures of the same sort and may perhaps have had a similar
origin. Whether that was so or not, we may conclude with a fair degree of
probability that if the King of the Wood at Aricia lived and died as an
incarnation of a sylvan deity, he had of old a parallel at Rome in the men
who, year by year, were slain in the character of King Saturn, the god of
the sown and sprouting seed. 6