Saturnalia

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Romans Midwinter Festival. This is our Saturnalia special. was a hugely popular Roman holiday. The poet Catullus calls it Optimus Deorum, the best of days. And it is centred around the god Saturn, who, in spite of... of having a planet named after him, and a day actually, now I think about it, is an incredibly opaque figure.

That's not to say that he wasn't important. He was really important. You can still see columns from the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, the west end of it, I think. A temple to Saturn has stood there since the beginning of the 6th century.

BC, the Roman Republic's earliest days anyway, at the bottom of the Capitoline Hill, as it would have been. So we have records of it lasting hundreds and hundreds of years before we think of ancient Rome being a thing. It wasn't just a temple. It was an irarium.

So important on two counts, we might say. And when I say that Saturn is opaque, it's because he's an ancient Roman god, but we don't have many sources from early Roman times. At some point, the Romans... become closer in contact with the Greeks, and their gods undergo a process of twinning. Like towns, but with deities. Syncretism is the proper word. But Saturn gets twinned with the Greek god Kronos.

Kronos is the father of Zeus in Greek mythology. Saturn is the father of Jupiter, the best and greatest, Optimus Maximus in Roman mythology. And so you can see how they kind of get mapped onto one another. Kronos is, I mentioned him being the...

father of Zeus there and Saturn being the father of Jupiter. Chronos is an absolutely terrible father. And you need to know that before we go anywhere near a festival that celebrates him in any way. When I say he's a terrible father, what I mean is that he eats his children. one by one as they are born, until Rhea, their mother, substitutes a stone for Zeus, her youngest, and Cronos eats that instead, because...

He's not just a terrible father, he's a really inattentive eater. And then regurgitates the children in reverse order. of swallowing, which is how Hestia is both the oldest and youngest, and Zeus is both the youngest and oldest. No, I know. But what I'm saying is if you've ever overeaten at Christmas and regretted it, you're maintaining an ancient noble tradition. Would you please welcome my guests, Llewellyn Morgan and Andre Vincent.

Llewellyn, Saturn is a crucial Roman god. And I guess I am wondering, therefore, why he is so mysterious. Why do we know so little about him? I think an important consideration is that the ancients were, generally speaking, as profoundly confused about what they did at these events as modern people trying to make sense of it.

It seems to have something to do with the crops, with cereal crops. But then at the same time, the ancients sort of derived his name, Saturnus, from this word for sowing, Serosatus. It's completely impossible. They love made-up etymology, don't they? They did, they did, they did. He's unusual as a god for being...

Either very, very negative, all the stuff about eating his children, or very, very positive, because he's the god who was king of Italy when Italy experienced this golden age. I suppose one way of bringing it together is that he's... the god of the deep deep past and the deep deep past might be primitive in that kind of sense of everybody eating each other or something like that or it's pristine

before human corruption came along. So an ancient god, everybody agrees he's an ancient god at any rate.

Just as Saturn is a very ancient Roman god, Saturnalia is a really old Roman festival. The historian Livy, who's writing in the 1st century BCE, dates it to the beginning of the 5th century BCE. That may well not be right. definitely changes and perhaps it becomes more important at the end of the 3rd century BCE, again because of Roman contact with the Greeks. The way that they celebrate festivals gets...

Greekified a bit. Saturnalia is celebrated with the Greek rite, we're told. But to just give you context, the end of the third century BCE, at 202, the Romans beat the Carthaginians and Hannibal at Zama, the Second Punic Wars. So they're just becoming the pre-

eminent Mediterranean power. So this is when they're becoming important and the Greeks are influencing them the whole time. The religious bit of Saturnalia, like the public cult celebrations that priests do, that happens on December the 17th. It comes right between two other Roman festivals. They love a festival. Consuelia, which I think is on the 15th of December, and Opelia, which I think is the 19th. So it's smack bang in the middle. Both those two festivals are agricultural in origin.

right there to do with the storing of corn because in the winter of course nothing's growing and so you want to eat the corn that you stored in the harvest and saturnalia may also have begun as an agricultural festival it's the end of the sewing season i think so this is the time for using up that grain you got in the autumn inevitably as with all winter festivals

the celebration spread out from this one religious day. So Cicero, mid-first century BCE, in a letter to his pal Atticus, is on the third day of Saturnalia parties. And remember, this is Cicero. He is not the original good time had by all. So if he is having three days of celebrations, everyone else is doing at least 19.

There is a book about Saturnalia, which was written in the 5th century, so really late, practically modern history, by a man named Macrobius, which I fully accept sounds like something that you want in yogurt. But he is really interested in... the origins of Saturnalia and how it began it's all very mysterious and opaque even then he reckons in the first century so that's the time of Catullus and Cicero there were already seven days of festivities for Saturnalia what it seems to mean is that

the official length of time designated for Saturnalia, people had a week. They had a nice week of parties is what happened. Augustus, the Emperor Augustus, puts the courts into recess for three days over Saturnalia. That's a bank holiday essentially. So three days of those. Caligula, according to Suetonius, added an extra day to increase public happiness forever. That's not normally Caligula's goal, frankly. When Macrobius writes his book, I mean, this is late.

fifth century, why would you do it then? I mean, Christianity is already the state religion, so how come he's so interested in Saturnalia at that point? Yeah, and Macrobius was certainly a Christian as well, and not in any doubt about being a Christian. What he's doing really is he's evoking the end of pagan Rome and he's picking on a festival. the Saturnalia, which I suppose from his perspective is the essence of

The pagan, you know, if you're going to have these pagan intellectuals coming together and discussing the Saturnalia, actually they spend most of their time discussing Virgil, which is excellent. You're all in paper. That's what you do at Christmas, isn't it? Constantly. family go crazy, but I just plough on the regards. And now the Eclog.

And is that how the whole thing gets sort of blurred to become kind of Roman and Greek? There's Greek influences on this Roman festival. The whole thing becomes a mythical past and this is just what we do now. That's the way with Christmas traditions too, actually. Yeah, absolutely. Stuff would come together from all kinds of... different sources. There's Greek stuff there and Etruscan stuff there and all kinds of things and that's part of the whole fun of it I think.

Let's look at what happens in the festivities of Saturnalia. First up, the statue of Saturn. Statues of ancient gods both represent but also embody those gods. So it's an image of the god but also the goddess sort of present.

in that statue. And the statue of Saturn on the day of Saturnalia has its legs unbound, which I know sounds weird, but the rest of the year, actually this is only going to sound weirder. Well, we'll just plough through, it'll be fine. Normally he has sort of... woollen bandages wrapped around his legs, which perhaps recalls the fact that Kronos, his Greek counterpart, after he's been overthrown by Zeus, gets bound in chains.

for being a bad god, bad, child-eating god. But what it definitely means for Saturn is that on his festival day, he's unbound, he's free in a way that he isn't the rest of the year. And that is very much a theme of Saturn. saturnalia there's a general sense of being free and of relaxing during this festival it's characterized by fun and feasting and drinking and games and that is true in every regard really but especially in what people wear So Saturnalia is a time for wearing hats.

I know, not paper hats. They don't have paper. But they do have a felt hat, which is called a pileus. And normally, these hats are worn by freed slaves. So they convey that your status has improved and that your life is free. Once it wasn't. So if everyone wears them at Saturnalia, perhaps we are meant to sense that everyone is equal. That's not a very Roman attitude, but it is a strange old festival. And it must mean that everyone is more free.

than they are the rest of the time. And I would like to confirm for the audience at home that the radio theatre are all currently wearing their felt caps. See? That's not all. You don't just wear your best hat. You also set aside your toga for saturnalia and replace it with something called synthesis or canatoria. This is casual wear. They're basically like dining pyjamas. Which, if they're not a thing, must become a thing.

How are they not a thing? Where may I get my dining pyjamas? I do see, in fairness, that a toga seems quite casual to us because basically the only time we've ever worn them, it's a bed sheet. But what you have to know is that actually they're not a bed sheet. They're made of quite...

thick wool so they were really hot if you were at a party with lots of people and also you have to fold them in really specific formal ways so it's not as easy as it looks just wrapping yourself in a sheet is what I'm saying what you're thinking of is ghosts

Very different from Romans. So this is such a feature of Saturnalia, the changing of dress from toga to dining pyjamas, that we have a martial epigram about this. So this is from 91 CE, so the end of the first... century and the epigram in its entirety reads which means there is no one naughtier than Caricianus. At Saturnalia, he walks around wearing a toga.

I mean, the joke is, for those of you who are staring, which is very few of you actually considering, the joke is that Saturnalia, you go casual. So the most badly behaved man is the one who's wearing his toga because he's refusing to obey the rules. rules but it's saturnalia which is all about rule breaking so in fact the man who is breaking the rules is the most in the spirit of saturnalia even though he's wearing the opposite of what you're supposed to wear ahaha

Togger is incredibly hard to put on. It's the equivalent of wearing sort of black tie or something like this, a bow tie, you know, dead, dead formal. And is it Togger? Oh, and it's, sorry, it's toga. You should say tog. Don't say toga. Say toga. Also, don't say saturnalia. Say saturnalia. It's your saturnalia. Brilliant. OK, can I take this on from now? Do you know why?

What am I doing in my head? I'm looking at you as though you were Hermione Granger, going, Expelliarmus! It's Wingardium Leviosa! Not Wingardium Leviosa. Storks out. That's you today. You are Hermione Granger. Today and every day. I say it with love in my heart. You can say toga. I say toga. Yeah. Fine. I have to say, I am so out of my league, aren't I?

You phoned me up, you said, come and do my Christmas show. Every Christmas, you dress up as a woman and dame. Come and talk about it. And for the lot I say it, they're going, what? The reason that I asked you is because I think... that there are lots of overlaps between the traditions in pantomime, at which you are highly skilled, you have played buttons, you have played a dame, and those ideas of cross-dressing, but also of subverting power.

structures are absolutely essential to pantomime, I think. So when I watch a production of Snow White or Cinderella... usually the person who does all the kind of clever stuff and has all the agency is the dame, and she is essentially a working-class woman. And if it weren't for her, being on top of everything and smarter than all the aristocrats, you know, the...

beautiful put-upon princess wouldn't get to marry the handsome prince, and everything wouldn't end happily ever after. So I think there's this big overlap, and I thought you would know loads about pantomime, which you do, so that's why I asked you to come on. Ladies and gentlemen, Andre Vincent. APPLAUSE Hearing all the stuff of Topsy Turvy is really interesting.

Because it's something, when you look into the history of pantomime, everyone always just goes on about Commedia dell'arte, that it comes from that, that the Italians brought it over, and that's where we get it. And it's just not true. It really, when you look at it, it goes all the way. the way back to the fifth century wow to the to the mamas to the to the people who were creating the winter festivals

And what happened was, there used to be a thing called the king cake on the 4th of January. Right. Which is 12th night, topsy-turvy day, whatever you want to call it. Every household would make a big cake and they would get a big dry pea and a big dry bean. And if you got the pea in your slice, you became king for the day. And if you got the bean, you became queen for the day.

And this was everybody. This was the servants. Everybody did it. Everybody had a piece of the cake. And if a woman got the bean, she became the king. And if a man got the bean, he became the queen. And so we had this... sort of moment of this cross-dressing happening, this sort of like, you are now the queen, you are now the king. And the mummers took it over. They had a thing always on the 5th of January called the Plough Play.

They would go into a barn and all the farmers would go there. And it was sort of like a blessing to the early crop that they would go out and that was the day of the first plough. And they had this plate and they started to incorporate the... Cake, the king's cake. And men started dressing as women. Women started dressing as men. And the woman was usually dressed up. She was Prince Dim, but charming.

I've met him. Got changed to Prince Charming after all those years. I mean, he doesn't get less dim, though. That's true. It's usually the weakest part on stage. Yes. You just see all the kids going off to toilet as soon as the print starts coming. Can I go now? He's singing.

Role reversal and reversal of norms. These are major themes of Saturnalia. During this festival, I think pretty well uniquely in Roman society, slaves don't wait on their masters. They don't bring them food and drink. What happens instead, we are told, is that they get to eat before or alongside the people who normally they have to serve. Meanwhile, of course, those people who have money and power.

are pretending that they don't have it, but just for a few days. And in a way, I think it raises the question of whether it reinforces those dynamics by only temporarily removing them. But that's a separate question, perhaps. King of Saturnalia is declared in each house. I presume not an actual king of Saturnalia. A lord of misrule would dictate who drinks what, who has to answer impossible riddles, who has to do mad dares. It sounds like a good party is what I'm saying.

saying I'm probably too old for it but it does sound like it would have been fun and we can find out more about this in the second century writer Lucian's dialogue about Saturnalia and this sets up a little conversation between a priest of chronos lucian's writing in greek so he's going to use greek names so a priest of chronos slash saturn is speaking to his god and they're having a chat about saturnalia because the priest wants to know more and specifically what he wants to know

is what he'll get if he performs his due sacrifices. The Romans are really... honest about their religion and it's not about believing things or having faith it's about making an offering to a god or goddess so that they give you something excellent in return it's a very transactional relationship so his opening gambit is what will i get if i do all the sacrifices properly and chronos asks him what he would like and he says wealth uh especially gold silver

Ivory would be fine. I'd like nice clothes. Some land. Yep, happy to be landed. Landed gentry, that'd be all right. And Kronos says, oh, that's a bit awkward. That's not actually my area. You need to ask Zeus if you want those things. He's not around at the moment because I'm in charge for a week and in my week we don't do anything serious. So gold and ivory and nice clothes, that's serious stuff.

Not in charge of that. Here's what I'm in charge of. I can help you with drinking. Making a big noise. Games. Always helpful. Gambling. Double sixes every time. Oh, appointing kings of the feast, those lords of misrule. Clapping. It's always a useful skill, isn't it? Singing naked. I don't know if those two things are related. Dunking faces in icy water. I presume those last two are related.

But the priest wants to know more about Cronos's power. He says, Zeus isn't handing out any of the good stuff to me. So tell me again what I can get from you. And Cronos says, you know what? It's not nothing that I'm offering you. It's not a bad thing to always win at dice. which is what I'm able to give you. And you can drink and feast and be called a winner the whole time. And you can be king of Saturnalia if you want. And then you can set humiliating tasks for everyone else.

Hilarious. I guess, yeah, all right, it's only short-lived, but so is my time in charge. I'm only here for a few days. And then the priest asks the question that I think we would all be wanting to ask of Kronos. He says, did you really eat your children? And also, did you also eat a stone? Because someone tricked you. And Kronos says, don't be so cheeky. No one.

Certainly not a god, but nobody would eat their own children. There is that guy Thaestes, but no, let's just move on from that. Shut up, no one cares, priest. And he says, and also, you know, who doesn't know if they're eating an actual rock? What are your teeth made of? Of course I didn't. I didn't eat any babies. And also, no, Zeus didn't chain me up for all eternity, which is why I come here every year. Here's what happened. I just abdicated.

because I was quite tired. And it's quite a lot of work, actually, being in charge and blasting all those wrongdoers with thunderbolts. And I didn't fancy it anymore, so Zeus does that now. I think he likes it. I just do a few days once a year and it's a golden time. It reminds everyone of when I was in charge, when everyone was happy and well-fed and there was no slavery and no one did any ploughing and sewing.

I mean, this is a really extraordinary moment to find in an ancient text because you hardly ever get anyone even questioning the idea of slavery. And yet here in Lucian is the god Saturn pointing out that times were nicer when there wasn't slavery. Absolutely extraordinary.

Although I guess he does also mention that there's no ploughing and sewing. So you can afford not to have slavery as far as his mindset goes when no one has to do any agricultural work. But when actual hard labour has to be done, then sorry, no one else is going to do it. So we better enslave some. people is the essential system. And then the priest has another question for him, which is...

why do we have your festival in the middle of winter when it's supposed to be really cheering? And Cronos says, I don't think we need to worry about that. Let us gamble for nuts. Which is how I intend to get rid of questions I don't want to answer in the future. Let's gamble for nuts and then watch their confused face. Just walk away.

So you can get a sense from that dialogue, I think, that Saturnalia is a fun festival, apart from the icy dunking, that you have these banquets, which must be a lot like up Pompeii or a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, hopefully not like Caligula. And that means lots of food and wine and games and much more. A real party, in other words. But people also exchanged gifts. And in the spirit of that, I've got gifts for you.

And Ali is going to bring, they're going to get handed along and then pass them along your row. Everyone's getting sweets for Saturnalia. There should be some up in the balcony too, balcony people. We didn't want you to be forgotten. Yes, the balcony has sweets. Yes. Don't throw them at the people down here. I've had to speak to you about this before.

Food is a really big Saturnalia gift. There are a whole set of poems of epigrams by Marshall where he talks about presents that are given at Saturnalia and they are mainly food-based. So this is very much... I'm not going to say that the chocolate is fully representative of Roman times.

But, you know, we couldn't give you nuts because, you know, somebody might be allergic. And we couldn't give you oysters because they give me the heebs. And there is one Marshall poem which is given in the voice of a sausage. But I'm vegetarian, so you couldn't have that. No, you have to have chocolate. Just like it and pretend you do. The sound of you all happily rustling is my new favourite thing. How's everyone going? Has everyone got sweets now?

Yay, Saturnalia sweets. What's the voice of a sausage, by the way? I mean, the sausage... I love that nobody reacted. Yes, yes, yes. Of course you won't have sausage, the voice of a sausage. Yeah, I was at the sausage poem bit again, Natalie. They all go, yeah. Panto is intrinsically... Anarchic and surreal. Oh, yeah, yeah. I feel that... Well, again, it's slightly, you know, changing all the time. I like my dame that I am, which is, it's a bloke in a dress.

that's what it should be. And now they're becoming quite beautiful drag queens. And that sort of dameness is moving on, which... As a person who sort of like looks and goes, am I going to be losing work? Because people want... Yeah, I'm not doing panto this year. What? I'm in Elf, the musical. The ICC in...

So you've just swapped being a dame for being an elf? I'm not. I'm playing Father Christmas. I'm going round the stadium. You are not? Are you really? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I get to ride around the sleigh. You're the lord of misrule. With a beard. Are you going to come down the special Saturnalia chimney? So people exchanged gifts at Saturnalia, and a lot of them were food, but a lot of them weren't. So the very popular gifts of Saturnalia were...

Clay figures of people and also candles were very popular gifts. And these might recall a darker time, literally and metaphorically, given fewer candles, in the past when worship of Saturn... included perhaps human sacrifice. No, I know. I mean, there's a lot of human sacrifice in ancient times. We don't talk about it very often. But we're told in one source that people used to make human sacrificial offerings and those lives were dedicated to Hades, I guess. But they used to dedicate...

The word in Greek, föta, means both light and life. And those were given, I think this is right, to Saturn. So what happens is that you used to dedicate... lives to Saturn kill people but now you give them candles instead which is much nicer and so lots of delightful Lights occur, and that's what we want. As I say, there's a book of Marshall epigrams all about Saturnalia and Saturnalia gifts, and it's called the Ksenia.

And this describes the sort of presents that people give. You could buy one of his books. He's always got an eye to the main chance, Marshall, and I like this about him, obviously. So one of the very earliest poems in the collection says, you could buy one of my books, obviously, for Saturnalia. Don't let me stop. a few four sesterces from the bookseller. And then because it's Marshall, he goes, he'd been making a profit if it was two.

But mostly it's food. It's pheasants, it's dormice, it's truffles, oysters, beans, sausages, wine, incense. Things to delight the senses, in essence, even if it's not food, then something sensual. And that is, I think... the important thing for us to take away about Saturnalia, that it's a festival to delight the senses. It might have only lasted for a week each year, but Saturnalia was celebrated in one guise or another until maybe the 11th century. And now it's being celebrated again by us.

the classics was written and performed by me, Natalie Haynes. My guests were Llewellyn Morgan and Andre Vincent and our producer was the majestic Ms. Mary Ward-Lowry.