Editor Hana Conte - 9
The Roman Times
Io Saturnalia!
2nd VP Daniel Kim (Sycamore)
As many of us OJCLers get excited for the cold winter and holiday season, I want to talk about one of the great holidays celebrated in ancient Rome. Saturnalia was a week long celebration dedicated to Saturn, the god of time and agriculture. Similar to our modern day Christmas, Saturnalia was filled with gift giving, feasts and banquets, partying, and a carnival atmosphere where people gambled and made sacrifices. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the god of agriculture who was said to have ruled over the world during a golden age where humans enjoyed spontaneous bounty of earth without labor in a state of innocence. The celebration of Saturnalia is said to reflect those conditions of the lost mythical
age. While Saturnalia is the best
known Roman holiday, it is not
described as a whole from
beginning to end in a single
ancient source. Modern
understanding of this festival is
pieced together from several
accounts dealing with various
aspects of the celebration.
Saturnalia was the setting of a
multivolume work of the same
name by Macrobius, a Latin writer
who is the major source for what
we know about the celebration
today. In his work, Macrobius
describes the reign of Justinus or
“King Saturn” as "a time of great
happiness, both on account of the
universal plenty that prevailed
and because as yet there was no
division into bond and free – as
one may gather from the complete
license enjoyed by slaves at the Saturnalia”. Another account made by Lucian in his Saturnalia, it is Saturn himself who declares a "festive season, when 'tis lawful to be drunken, and slaves have license to revile their lords". Although the festival was very popular in early Roman history, the popularity of Saturnalia rose significantly in the 3rd and 4th century AD as the Roman empire came under Christian rule. Many of the celebration's customs were recast into or at least influenced the seasonal celebrations surrounding the Christian celebration of Christmas and the secular New Year. So the next time you celebrate the holidays with your family, remember that the Romans did it first.