| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
§ 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. |
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