The Ancients - Saturnalia: Bonus Episode!

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

In this episode from the History Hit archive, Dan talks to Kevin Butcher about the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Held between the 17 and 23 December, Saturnalia invloved plenty of drinking, gift-giving, and a sense of a world turned upside-down.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello everyone, it's the Ancients on History Hit. Got a special bonus episode today, and it's all about Saturnalia,

that ancient Roman festival to the god Saturn, filled with revelry and celebrations that occurred at this time of year, described as the best of days by that raunchy Roman poet Catullus. And in this podcast, it's one from the History Hit archive, Dan Snow is joined by Kevin Butcher to talk all things Saturnalia. Quickly, a word from me, just want to say a quick thank you. It's been amazing the past six months to see the rise of the ancients from our first few episodes in july to now it's almost beyond words i just thank you so much to everyone who's been listening to the podcasts we've got so much planned in the new year we've already recorded

so many episodes that i cannot wait to share with you from the shongnu empire to ancient greek music to the rise of marius to what, oh, what else we got? To the 9th Legion, Thermopylae, Opians, Halieutica. We got so much planned, so much lined up. I cannot wait for 2021 and the ancients. There's a lot in store. Don't go anywhere. That's enough of me rambling on. Here is Dan Snow and Kevin Butcher talking about Saturnalia.

Now, at this time of year, people start worrying about gifts for their relatives, and they start comparing Christmas to Saturnalia. So what on earth is Saturnalia? Well, you could say that Saturnalia is sort of the Roman version of Christmas, but there are some differences. So originally it was a single day, the 17th of December, when people would basically have a kind of festival in honour of the god Saturn. And this involved partying and drinking and probably getting a bit drunk, tipsy, feasting, that kind of thing, overindulging a bit. So it does have some similarities to Christmas. And the Romans liked this festival a great deal. So, in fact, they liked it so much that over the centuries it got expanded from one day to seven days.

So it incorporated some other festivals as well. And it was originally a festival in honour of the god Saturn. The god Saturn was associated with agriculture and things of that sort, so it's kind of appropriate at this particular time of year. We're reaching the solstice. This is when the harvests have all come in, they've done the sowing and so on.

It's the shortest day of the year and days they can start getting lighter after this. So that's one aspect of Saturn that probably explains why it start getting lighter after this so that's one aspect of saturn that probably explains why it's taking place at that time at this particular time of year i'm being very stupid why should saturn because he's not associated therefore with fecundity and spring and growing that this point of the cycle it was thought that it was good to tip your hat to him was it yeah there's another aspect of saturn as well that's very important here. And Saturn is the father of Jupiter. And

Jupiter is the god that kind of rules the cosmos now. But there was a time when Saturn had ruled the cosmos. And this was known as the Golden Age. This is what the Romans thought of as kind of a bit like the equivalent of the Garden of Eden or Paradise for us. So it was a time when people lived a life of ease and food kind of generated itself spontaneously and there were no rich or poor and there was no money. So oddly, the golden age was a time when there was no gold. And so there was a kind of period when nobody had to do any work. So Saturnalia was kind of an attempt to revive that. It was a time when the differences between people and society

was supposed to be kind of levelled out. And slave was supposed to be equivalent to the master and things of this sort. So there was a kind of slight inversion of society. The Romans were really, really class conscious, of course. So in a way, this was a really, really daring and outrageous thing to do. But they liked this festival a great deal. So it was probably the most popular of the Roman festivals. The poet Catullus in the first century AD calls it the best of times or the best of days. So a little bit of good old nostalgia, making Saturn great again. Who'd have guessed it?

And is there a sense in which it is these short days? I mean, I do not know enough about the pre-modern agricultural calendar. But is there a sense actually there is a limited amount that you can do? If you're working on the land, there's not a huge amount left for you to do in these very, very short days in the middle of winter. Yeah, I mean, that's partly the case. And certainly, I mean, a lot of cultures have some kind of festival around about this time of year that includes feasting and drinking. So it's not too surprising to find that the Romans also have something rather similar to the Christian festival that we have at this time of the year as well. I've heard stories, no doubt you'll correct me, but that masters used to wait table on their

slaves and things during this winter festival. Yeah, I mean, that was the sort of thing that was supposed to happen. So the slaves were put on a special kind of cap called a pileus, which is a kind of a pointed cap. And this was the cap of liberty. And they were supposed to be able to gamble and they were free for the duration of this festival, technically. And they could kind of joke with their masters and even be insolent or so it was claimed. And masters were then supposed to also wear the cap of liberty and they would perhaps wait on the slaves at the table. Now, it's not all that certain that that kind of thing went on in every household.

I think it depended largely on the relationship between the slave and his master. Some masters were known to be very harsh and we can imagine that they probably didn't wait on their slaves at all. Some masters were probably less inclined to be all that jolly. So, for example, Pliny the Younger, he's writing a letter to one of his friends and he's saying, you should come and have a look at my lovely villa and he starts describing his lovely villa by the sea. Towards the end of the letter, he says,

I've got this amazing room in this villa, and it's connected by a corridor to the rest of the house, but you can't hear anything that's going on in the rest of the house if you're in it. So he says, well, when we're holding the Saturnalia, and the slaves are all living it up or whatever, I can just go away into this amazing little room and work. I can't hear a thing, which kind of implies that maybe Pliny was a bit of a party pooper. But of course, these letters were intended to be published.

So maybe this is the way sober Romans are supposed to behave and they're not really supposed to go crazy at Saturnalia. But perhaps that was just his public image. And for all we know, he might have been having a knees up with the slaves in the rest of the house anyway. Yeah, so tell me, what other evidence do we have for what was going on in Saturnalia? Clearly, what people were doing was they were going out into the streets,

they were singing, they were carousing, they were going around to people's houses, having parties and things like that. There were also public banquets. So one key festival at Rome was that the image or one of the images of Saturn was brought out of the temple, processed to the forum, and there was a big public banquet that took place there. And basically, the image of Saturn was kind of presiding over the whole thing. So there'd be a grand public banquet, there'd be lots of wine and

so on. A Roman poet called Statius, writing at the end of the first century AD, says that the Emperor Domitian holds one of these big parties and he makes it into a really big event. And wine is flowing in like rivers and there's masses of food and he releases all these birds that people can kind of catch. So it's a bit like the golden age all over again, the food just appearing out of the blue. And there are all kinds of exotic things happening, whether pygmies fighting against cranes, that is the birds rather than the heavy lifting equipment. And there are people dressed as Amazons fighting the pygmies. And also it says there are women who are released who are basically prostitutes. So there's a whole series of things that are kind of going on in this big, massive party downtown.

Afterwards, we have people go to other people's houses. There's this mock king that's sometimes chosen. Slaves are gambling. Interestingly, they're supposed to gamble with nuts, not with money, because, of course, the Golden Age was a time when they didn't have money. So they gambled with nuts instead. So there's a proverbial phrase saying, you you've lost your saturnalian nuts or whatever so slaves are gambling and everybody's gambling people are drinking they're wearing very informal dress so normally of course roman citizens they're wandering around unofficial

business in togas now they're supposed to be wearing kind of brightly colored clothes and everybody is wearing simple or fancy dress clothes it's again a case of the formal dress codes that were very important in roman society to tell you who you were they've all been lost just for these few days and and people are kind of wearing different kinds of clothes for once and oh yeah well there were christmas decorations i'm sorry whoa throw it and slip there no there were saturnalian decorations yeah they did actually use things like holly and ivy so they might decorate homes with garlands or sprigs of it they might put that kind of thing on their heads that must have been a bit scratchy in the case of ho. And in fact, Holly was supposed to be sacred to Saturn. I mean, it's probably not too surprising to find them using these kind of things.

If you want a bit of greenery at this time of the year, that's the kind of thing you'll have to go to is Holly or Ivy. But yeah, it is part of the Saturnalia tradition as well. Tell me more about the kind of gifts that people might give and receive. Well, there was a sort of feeling that they ought to be slightly naff. They were kind of joke presents some of the time. So all the trifling things. So you might get, you know, dice or a hairpin or a comb or something like that.

The kind of things you might expect to get in a Christmas cracker these days. the kind of things you might expect to get in a Christmas cracker these days. We do actually have a book by the poet Marshall, which is basically a set of small poems that is a bunch of labels for these presents. So you can actually see the kinds of things that they're giving each other. So, yeah, there are things, worthless things or very cheap things, like a ball or lamps or clay statuettes were one of the things key things that people gave each other but you also sometimes find richer romans are giving each other fancier presents so a gold cup or a couch or a bookcase which must have been very impractical

or a parrot that can say hail caesar that kind of thing but there are also kind of jokes the labels i suppose it might be a little bit like the things that come in christmas crackers the labels might have slight jokes or insults to them so you know you comb given to a bald man or what looks like a love letter uh when you get a bit closer to it it turns out to be a joke invoice or a purse for a stingy person it's kind of like a speech bubble from the purse saying don't use me but don't put food in me or let my your dog sleep on me all that kind of thing or a woman's girdle on it's basically the joke there is well this is quite a short girdle

so if you are pregnant by the time as you get as your bump gets bigger this girdle is going to be too short to hide it and those kind of things so it's all part of this sort of jesting and joking it seems everything you're saying is quite an egalitarian festival in supposedly such a hierarchical society what did that tell us about tell us about rome is it is it secretly they yearned for a for a more equal society or that this was a sort of safety release valve well there's certainly there is the theory that it was some kind of safety release valve. The Golden Age, I don't think we should ever underestimate the power of this kind of illusion of the Golden Age that there had been this time in the distant past when all people had been equal.

And that was a very, very powerful draw. And clearly, the Romans really liked this festival. They thought it was great. So we shouldn't underestimate the power of the Saturnalia. It really was a very, very important festival. You mentioned this became a sort of seven, extended out to a seven-day festival. Is that an indication of the wealth, the power, the ability to enjoy the leisure time that people in this imperial centre would have enjoyed as it reached its point of hegemony over the Mediterranean, Western European world? Well, I think it's a reflection of its popularity. There were lots of holidays in the Roman calendar.

It must have been actually very difficult to get a lot of public business done because there were so many holidays. Emperors sometimes wanted to restrict the number of days. So we sometimes find it kind of seesawing backwards and forwards officially. Maybe it's reduced to four days or something like that, or it goes to three days and then back to four days

and then back to seven days. But probably a lot of people just wanted a party for the seven days. So yeah, it's just a reflection of the fact that the Romans did have quite a lot of holidays. And that would have been in Rome itself, but in all of its provinces as well? Yeah, we have a letter from Hadrian's Wall from the military site of Vindolanda. And there there's a letter

from a slave who's writing to another slave, and he's asking this slave to buy some stuff for the Saturnalia. So, you know, try and buy this stuff cheaply if you can. The only item we have on it is radishes, which doesn't sound particularly festive, but maybe that's their equivalent to Brussels sprouts. And to what extent, I mean, as we transition to Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, how does that affect the marking of Saturnalia? Saturnalia actually continued after the Roman Empire had become a Christian empire. after the Roman Empire had become a Christian empire. So it seems to have perhaps lost importance gradually. By the middle of the 5th century, there's a writer who mentions it and he says, oh, it used to be in honour of the god Saturn

and it's a festival for slaves, which kind of suggests that it's not quite as important as it was earlier on. But we also have a text from about 50 years previously, which is a kind of imaginary party being held at Saturnalia by a group of intellectuals. And part of it is that they're discussing the origins of Saturnalia.

And it's kind of interesting because it's a bit like a sort of work of comparative religion and they're starting to think about well what are the origins of all the all these customs and half the time they don't have any idea but one of the things that one of the conclusions they come to is well perhaps underlying all of this is uh some kind of worship of the sun god or something like that so even they were thinking about comparisons between religions at this time. As I'm listening to you, I'm struck by the fact that if the Romans knew that grotesque wealth, inequality and slavery were sort of undesirable and that for one week every year you could return to this innocent time

before these evil influences corrupted the world. What does that tell us about their sort of political, social, economic outlook? I mean, I've always assumed the Romans regarded slavery not as an evil, but just as a feature of the human condition. Well, I wonder whether, in fact, it was a way of kind of affirming society. You're inverting it. You're kind of turning it upside down, but at the same time there's still that kind

of threat there behind things. It's interesting that there's a work, basically a book of poems written by a Roman poet called Marshall towards the end of the first century AD. And this contains a set of very short poems

and basically what they are is kind of short labels that are supposed to go with Saturnalia presents. Because one of the things that they do is they give each other presents at this time of year. One of them is a present of whips. And it says on it, the little label, basically it says, Enjoy your time now, slaves, but don't kind of overstep your boundaries because at the end of Saturnalia, these whips are coming out. So there's potentially always a slight kind of threat there. It's kind of maybe reaffirming society. And the Romans can always be relied upon to produce elderly poets

and authors who are complaining about the state things are in. Does this expansion into a week long festival, does it become too licentious? Does it become too immoral for some observers? Yes. I mean, the elite Romans like to think of themselves as being very sober. And in the middle of the first century AD, Seneca, a Roman senator and a philosopher, he writes a letter to a friend and he says, oh, it's this time of year again. And although it's cold, all of Rome is in a sweat preparing for the Saturnalia. And before long, there are going to be people out in the streets and everybody singing and drinking and puking in doorways and that kind of thing. And he says to his friend, I wish you were there with me.

Maybe we could have a really miserable time., maybe we could go out into the streets and pretend to be having a good time or not have quite a good time as everybody else. And this will be OK. But, you know, we can't kind of let our hair down and go really mad. So there's definitely among certain members of the Roman elite in particular, this is kind of slightly frowned upon. certain members of the Roman elite in particular. This is kind of slyly frowned upon. It's interesting that that starts to give us the enduring myth that people like Gibbon and others and people love nowadays, particularly in the USA, this idea that the Roman Empire collapsed because they all got too interested in drinking, having sex with each other

and dancing around, taking holidays, rather than being simple, the nobility of the soil that ploughed their furrows. And then when the call came, took up arms and fought in a sort of patriot army. Yeah, there is, of course, this idea that the Romans were dissolute. But this was something that comes from the Romans themselves. They're always complaining about how decadent they've become and how they used to be virtuous in the past. So, I mean, we've got to take some of that with a pinch of salt. And in many ways, Romans could actually be quite prudish or they, particularly elite Romans, like to think of themselves as being very sober. After all,

they're meant to be the masters of the world and they can't kind of go crazy. But of course, emperors had more or less absolute power. So some of them could do all kinds of outrageous things, and the emperor was this kind of source of gossip, and people could kind of project fantasies onto the characters of emperors. I ought to say, because this is the time of year when journalists quickly blow the dust off their pieces, saying actually all the Christians did was re-badge Saturnalia and it became our Christmas.

Is that true? Well, that's a tough one. I think what we could say is that Saturnalia and Christmas aren't really that directly connected. If anything, I think Christmas has kind of evolved to look more like Saturnalia. It certainly has taken on some of the features of giving a presence and things like that and going around to people's houses, having parties, feasting, drinking, all of those kind of things. Telling your boss what you think of them over the photocopier when you drink too much red wine? Yeah, well, it could be that as well. But if we actually look at what early Christians thought about Christmas, I mean, the very earliest Christians don't seem to have been interested in Christmas at all. As far as we can see,

for the first two centuries of Christianity, nobody's celebrating Christmas. There's not really any references to it. And the first real references we get are in about the year 200, where a writer called Clement of Alexandria, a Christian, he says that people are debating, you know, when was Jesus born?

And nobody can quite agree. And he gives some dates. And they're all in the spring. So they're all in March, April, or May. So there was clearly, you know, when people started to think about it, there was no real tradition there. I mean, if you actually go back to the original text, the two gospels that mention the nativity, they don't actually give a date at all. And the first evidence we have for the date of 25th of December is a Roman calendar dated AD 354. It contains all kinds of

anniversaries and things in it. The entry for the 25th of December, and in there it has Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea. But also on the same day, it has an entry saying the birthday of the unconquered son. So it sort of suggests there's an association between the sun god, Sol, and Jesus. Now, that could be seen as plausible in that the Emperor Constantine, who was the emperor who brought Christianity or made Christianity the kind of official religion of the Roman Empire, before he was interested in Christianity, he was a worshipper of the unconquered sun. In fact, the commonest thing on his coins is the unconquered sun. So one could perhaps see Constantine as somebody who maybe brought these two festivals together. But there is actually a problem with that because there is some evidence that the 25th

of December was already celebrated before Constantine. It's only circumstantial evidence, but there's a group of heretics called the Donatists who appear to have celebrated Christmas on the 25th of December. So we seem to have something between about AD 200 where they're not really quite sure when Christ was born, but it's sort of somewhere in the spring to a century later, they've settled on something around this time of year. And so that does really open up the question, well, you know, what association does the 25th of December have for the Christians? Is it something pagan underlying at all, or is it a date that they've chosen themselves? And there is some evidence, I think, to say that it's something they've chosen themselves. Possibly

the reason why they chose it has to do with a trend of thought that was developing in the third century in Christianity. The most important festival for the Christians was Easter, so the passion of crucifixion and resurrection. And there was this idea that developed that the Annunciation, so when Jesus is conceived, fell on exactly the same day that he was crucified. And this kind of appealed to them because, you know, it's the kind of cycles of creation and redemption. And in the Roman calendar, the 25th of March was supposed it's the kind of cycles of creation and redemption. And in the Roman calendar, the 25th of March was supposed to be the date of the crucifixion. In the East, they're using a different calendar, and so they came up with the date of the 6th of April. Now, if you calculate nine months' pregnancy from the 25th of March, you end up with the 25th of December.

And likewise, if you start on the 6th of April, you end up with the 25th of December. And likewise, if you start on the 6th of April, you end up with the 6th of January. And in fact, in late antiquity, these two dates are used for the date of the birth of Jesus. So it's quite possible that it's really something within the Christian tradition. And of course, the 6th of January, now we tend to use it as epiphany. And this is sometimes associated with the choosing of a mock king. And interestingly there, of course, you do have a crossover with Saturnalia because one of the things that happened at Saturnalia was that they chose a mock king. Roman households would usually choose, say, the lowliest person in the household to be king for the day type thing. And then the king would be

able to give people ridiculous commands. Obviously, depending on what the master felt, he might not be able to give the master particularly ridiculous commands. And people probably did have to watch what kind of commands they gave. They were probably fairly innocuous ones. One example we have is one where it's in the reign of the emperor claudius and his adopted son nero is with his friends and they're playing dice to see who's going to be king and nero wins and so nero then gets his friends to do various silly things and when he comes to his half brother britannicus this is a family remember this is a family show. I've heard how Britannicus... When it comes to Britannicus,

he then says, I'll sing a song. So it doesn't sound to be anything particularly nasty. But then Britannicus sings a song about being disinherited. And of course, Nero

has disinherited Britannicus. Britannicus ought to have become emperor after his father Claudius. And instead, Nero is going to become emperor. And the rest of the audience feels very sorry for Britannicus but Nero becomes incensed and from this point onwards he plots to kill Britannicus. So things could go wrong in the Saturnalia. Yeah you don't say alcohol transgression I mean is there any sense though that the christians were rather drawn to the

the culture of saturnalia in terms of exalting the weak exalting the the lowest and and and turning them into rulers it's uh not unlike the christian or unlike the sermon on the mount i mean there may be something in that certainly i mean when when the two are coexisting so there's a kind of christian festival and the saturnalia in late antiquity it's possible there's a kind of Christian festival and the Saturnalia in late antiquity. It's possible there's some crossover there. Okay, well, let's not publish all the articles. I won't publish an article on that then. That's a lukewarm response. And so it sounds to me like ultimately human beings,

they have fun in midsummer, they have fun at midwinter as well. So it's not that the Christians absolutely just absorbed Saturnalia and made it their own. No, I mean, it's definitely some kind of independent festival. And maybe, I don't know whether we should perhaps end by doing the traditional Saturnalian greeting, which is one person will say, yo, Saturnalia. And the other person will respond by saying, yo, Saturnalia. Well, let's try it. So everybody, enjoy your midwinter festival, your Christmas, your Saturnalia, whatever it is.

And thank you very much for listening. Yo, Saturnalia. Yo, Saturnalia. I hope you all did that at home. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.