Saturnalia was one of the oldest and most popular Roman festivals.
It began on December 17th, but grew over time, and by the Imperial Period, ended on December
23rd.
On the first day of Saturnalia, everything in Rome shut down, and people were expected
to forgo their normal attire and instead wear plain, simple tunics.
This included Senators, and magistrates, and candidates for office, men who normally wore
specialized togas proudly displaying their status.
Similarly, everybody, from citizen to freedman to slave was supposed to wear a special leather
cap that was normally worn by freed slaves to denote their status.
They went to all of this trouble because during this festival, the strict formality of the
class system was temporarily thrown out the window.
The entire theme of Saturnalia was to upend the social order, and to celebrate liberty.
To begin the festivities, a large crowd gathered at the Temple to Saturn, on the Capitoline
Hill.
Saturn was a god with a very complicated history with a lot of different associations, including
with the Capitoline Hill, with wealth, with agriculture, and yes, with liberation.
For most of the year, for a reason that is lost to us, the statue of Saturn outside the
temple had its feet covered with some distinctive wool wrappings.
These wrappings were removed by some priests, which marked the official beginning of Saturnalia.
By the way, we're told that this statue was actually hollow, and filled with olive oil,
which is kinda neat.
With the festival officially underway, a priest performed a sacrifice before the crowd.
After this, members of the Roman Senate came forward.
Somewhere nearby, there was another statue of Saturn, this one made of wood, carved specifically
for this festival.
Senators picked up this statue, and carried it down to the forum.
The crowd followed.
After a time, they arrived at an outdoor banquet area.
The Senators placed the statue on a large reclining sofa that had been set aside for
it.
Then, with Saturn lazily overseeing the whole thing, there was a massive feast, and the
wine began to flow.
After the feast, there was usually some gladiatorial games, where all of the different classes
co-mingled and rubbed elbows.
Like everything else, the games were supposed to continue the theme of upending the social
order.
For example, they sometimes featured women or dwarf gladiators.
It was all meant to be funny, but it's worth saying that some Romans found these blood-sports
distasteful and stayed away whenever they could.
My boy Cicero, for instance, hated them.
Now, on a normal day, the gladiatorial event would have ended, the sun would have went
down, and that would have been it.
But on Saturnalia they were just getting started.
Rome's streets were normally dark and dangerous to navigate at night, but today it was lined
with decorative candles and torches.
People took full advantage of this, and many party-goers stayed out all night.
On Saturnalia, it was customary to loudly greet friends, strangers, and passers by,
with the call and response "Io, Saturnalia."
This was ubiquitous, and some Saturnalian Scrooges would say that they got pretty sick
of hearing "Io, Saturnalia" from drunken idiots outside when they were trying to read, or
sleep.
Speaking of drunken idiots, it was also customary, after the sun went down, to host parties,
continuing the festivities.
Once inside, a person was selected randomly, more or less, to be something called the Saturnalicius
Princeps, which you can translate as the King of Saturnalia.
The theme of overturning the social order continued, so this person tended to be a child
or a slave.
Custom demanded that any command given by the King of Saturnalia had to be obeyed without
question.
But it was all one big joke, so the commands tended to be things like "sing a song!" or
"do a dance!"
or "everybody drink!"
The parties would continue with people drinking, playing games, and gambling all night.
There were normally some legal restrictions on gambling, especially with dice, but these
were all temporarily lifted for the duration of the festival.
Even slaves would get in on the gambling, sometimes with their owners.
If a group couldn't afford to bet actual money, it was quite common to bet nuts, instead.
People talked endlessly about how they were looking forward to the Saturnalian nuts every
year.
Apparently it was a thing.
I mentioned slaves, and we should pause here for a minute.
The whole theme of Saturnalia was liberty, and slaves were an important part of that
equation.
Many social norms regarding slaves were disregarded for the duration of the festival.
For instance, perhaps the most famous factoid about Saturnalia is this: slave owners would
jokingly swap places with their slaves and serve them dinner.
But let's not get too carried away with this role reversal.
It seems that the more common practice was for the slaves to eat with the owners on equal
footing, and for the owners to get up and serve the food themselves.
In this way you can kind of think of Saturnalia as an opportunity to give the slaves some
time off, although that analogy is imperfect, since they were still on the hook for preparing
the food.
But in keeping with the spirit of the holiday, slaves were also allowed to speak disrespectfully
to their owners without any fear of repercussion.
But everybody knew that the whole thing was in the spirit of fun, and I couldn't find
any actual examples of slaves going full Festivus and staging an Airing of Grievances.
It seems more likely that owner and slave temporarily dropped the formality and spoke
to each other as equals.
That all happened on the first day of Saturnalia, but celebrations continued for a full week.
The next day the parties, and gambling, and drinking continued.
On December 19th, the third day of the Saturnalia, there was another little holiday called the
feast of the Opalia.
The purpose of this day was to honour Saturn's wife, Ops, who was a goddess of the harvest.
There had already been one festival devoted to Ops at the end of the harvest season, and
now, in December, there was a second one, celebrating the bounty contained in the granaries.
By the way, Ops is where we get the English word opulence.
On this day the cautious hording food for the winter was abandoned, and there were huge
feasts.
The nature of Saturnalia meant that people were already eating and drinking as much as
they wanted, but but nobody seemed to mind having the excuse to kick off another round
of parties.
Another important aspect of Saturnalia, was the exchange of gifts.
These were usually small items, like toys, or books, or dining-ware, or exotic foods.
The most popular gift of all was something called a sigillaria, which was a small humanoid
figurine made of wax or clay – basically a doll.
During the month of December, specialized shops would pop up all over Rome, where you
could have a sigillaria custom-made and personalized as a gift.
From what we can tell, the number of gifts exchanged was staggering.
Basically, during Saturnalia, everybody expected to receive a gift from everybody they knew.
And not just a gift, but also a short personalized note, or a poem.
Gifts were evaluated, and if somebody was caught sending a cheaper gift than they did
last year, it was a problem.
God forbid somebody send a gift and get nothing in return.
As you can imagine, mistakes happened all the time, and people took note.
On top of this, people took the time during the festival to go door-to-door visiting with
neighbours and acquaintances.
Small, generic gifts were expected to be given to anybody who came knocking, which added
an additional level of complexity to the whole thing.
Between all the gifts, the personalized notes, the feasts, the partying, and gambling, so
much stuff was involved with Saturnalia that people would spend most of December just getting
ready for it.
Eventually Saturnalia ended, and life returned to normal.
But before I let you go, let me share with you some short Epigrams written for Saturnalia
by a guy named Martial in the late 1st century.
Here's what Martial had
to say: