Io saturnalia6/7/2023 Saturn was said to have ruled on earth in the distant past during a “Golden Age,” when food came freely from the land without labor and everyone lived in peace. The abundance and license of Saturnalia was meant to imitate the utopian conditions of the kingdom of Saturn. Saturn, the festival’s namesake, was a deity associated so strongly with agriculture that the hollow ivory statue in his temple in Rome was filled with olive oil. Saturnalia continued to exist as a secular holiday alongside Christmas for at least another century, until the new religion gradually eclipsed the older and adopted some of its traditions, just as Saturnalia had adopted elements of earlier Greek and Roman festivals.Īlthough it evolved over time, Saturnalia remained at its core a celebration of the harvest. ![]() Saturnalia is sometimes called the Ancient Roman Christmas, although Christmas itself was first-celebrated in 4th-century Rome. Friends and family exchanged gifts, including toys for children, gag gifts between close friends (the famed poet Catullus once received a book of “the worst poems of all time”), and sigillariae, wooden or clay luck charms in the form of tiny faces. Masters waited on their slaves, and everyone wore the felt cap that usually distinguished freedmen (former slaves) from born citizens. Gambling, usually outlawed, was practiced openly, as revelers bet on games of dice and trivia and went bobbing for corks in tubs of water. During Saturnalia, people dressed in clashing colors that would have been laughed at any other time of year. ![]() ![]() It was the most important Roman holiday, a time of feasting and fun when the normal order of things was upended and social divides temporarily erased. Saturnalia dice-players in a wall-painting from Pompeii.įrom the 17th to the 23rd of December, Romans greeted each other with a hearty “Io Saturnalia!” (pronounced yo).
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