Martial on Saturnalia (Yuletide reading)

[Marcus Valerius Martialis (c10040-c10103 HE) suggests some appropriate Saturnalia gifts and their labels:]

T

o the reader: The whole multitude of presents contained in this thin little book will cost you, if you purchase it, four small coins. If four is too much, perhaps you may get it for two, and the bookseller, Trypho, will even then make a profit. These distichs you may send to your entertainers instead of a present, if money is as scarce with you as it is with me. The names of all the articles are given as headings; so that you may pass by those which are not to your taste.

Lentils: Receive these Egyptian lentils, a gift from Pelusium; if they are not so good as barley, they are better than beans.

Leeks: Whenever you have eaten strong-smelling shreds of the Tarentine leek, give kisses with your mouth shut.

Beans: If the pale bean boils for you in the red earthenware pot, you may often decline the suppers of rich patrons.

Asparagus: The delicate stalks cultivated on the coast of Ravenna will not be more grateful to the palate than this wild asparagus.

Raisins: I am a grape not suited to the cup or to Bacchus; but, if you do not attempt to drink me, I shall taste like nectar

Pine cones: We are the apples of Cybele; keep at a distance, passerby, lest we fall and strike your unfortunate head.

A jar of plums: These Syrian plums, which come to you enclosed in a wattled conical basket, had they been any larger, might have passed for figs.

Damascene plums: Accept these foreign plums, wrinkled with age: they are good for relaxing constipated bowels.

Ducks: Let a duck be brought to table whole: but only the breast and neck are worth eating; return the rest to the cook.

Mushrooms: To send silver or gold, a cloak or a toga, is easy enough, but to send mushrooms is difficult.

Ham: The ham is quite fresh; make haste, and delay not to invite your best friends; I will have nothing to do with a stale ham.

Egyptian beans: You will deride this Egyptian vegetable, with its wool that sticks so closely, when obliged to tear its obstinate filaments with teeth and hands.

Attic honey: The bee that throngs Thesean Hymettus has sent you this noble nectar from the forest of Minerva.

Alban wine: This wine is sent from Caesarean hills, from the sweet vineyard that flourishes on Mount Iulus.

Faleenian wine: This Massic wine comes from the presses of Sinuessa. Do you ask in whose Consulate it was bottled? It was before consuls existed.

Fundi wine: This wine of Fundi was produced in the splendid autumn of Opimius. The consul who saw it made drank of it when matured.

Trifoline wine: I, Trifoline wine, am not, I confess, of the first order but I hold, at least, the seventh place.

Nomentan wine: My Nomentan vineyard yields this wine. If Quintus is your friend, you will drink better.

Pelignian wine: The Pelignian vine-dressers send turbid Marsic wine. Touch it not yourself, but let your freed-man drink it.

Vinegar: Disdain not this amphora of Egyptian vinegar. It was much worse when it was wine.

Caeretan [wine]: Let Nepos place Caeretan wine on table, and you will deem it Setine. But he does not give it to all the world; he drinks it only with a trio of friends.

Perfumes: Never think of leaving perfumes or wine to your heir. Administer these yourself, and let him have your money.

Io Saturnalia

S

aturnalia and Hanukkah more or less coincide this year, which is indeed a coincidence, except insofar as both of them are seasonal festivals associated with the solstice. Since Julius Caesar, at any rate, the Roman calendar has been fixed to the apparent movements of the sun, while since the Exile the Judean calendar has been based on the (now long-defunct otherwise) luni-solar Babylonian reckoning.

I see from an early nineteenth-century compendium of universal history that the first Saturnalia was celebrated with the dedication of the temple of Saturn in 9407 HE (594 BCE), some 2607 years ago—if that’s at all believable. Of course there’s an arbitrary quality to it all—presumably the Romans were still on their original intercalated lunar calendar, and what date it would have fallen on using a proleptic Gregorian calendar is (as far as I can tell) anybody’s guess. The Penny Cyclopaedia, deriving its information from Macrobius, informs us that Saturnalia “had been celebrated by the Aborigines long before the building of the city, and was instituted by the fabulous king Janus, after the disappearance of Saturnus from the earth” according to some traditions, or was “instituted by the Pelasgians” or possibly by “king Tullus Hostilius, who, after a successful war against the Albans and Sabines, was said to have founded the temple and established the festival of Saturnus at Rome”.

Tullius Hostilius (reigned 9329-9361) was the third king of Rome, and is considered largely legendary, unlike his contemporary Manasseh (reigned 9314-9358), king of Judah, who is considered historical, despite the fact that all we really have for either of them is biased and uncertain testimony of much later documents. Both drew the criticism of their respective historians over religious matters. The Deuteronomist wrote of Manasseh that he “did that which was evil in Yahweh’s sight, after the abominations of the nations whom Yahweh cast out before the children of Israel. … He built altars for all the army of the sky in the two courts of Yahweh’s house. He made his son to pass through the fire, practiced sorcery, used enchantments, and dealt with those who had familiar spirits, and with wizards. He did much evil in Yahweh’s sight, to provoke him to anger.” (II Kings 21) His “persecution” of the Yahweh-alone faction (by allowing the worship of other deities) did not sit well with the historian, who attributed to him all the misfortunes that were to befall Judah later on. And Livy wrote of Tullus Hostilius that at first he “thought nothing less becoming a king, than to busy his thoughts in matters of religion,” and then, toward the end of his life became “a slave to every kind of superstition, in cases either of great or of trifling import, and even filled the minds of the people also with superstitious notions.” Eventually the king tried to restore “certain sacrifices, of a secret and solemn nature, [that] had been performed to Jupiter Elicius,” but screwed them up somehow and “through the resentment of Jupiter, for being addressed in an improper manner, was struck with lightning, and reduced to ashes, together with his house.” (History of Rome, I.31)

Still, regardless of the exact date, it was somewhen in there, two and a half millennia ago, that Saturnalia was first celebrated. When it was last celebrated appears to be an open question. Maybe it still is, in spirit. Like our own Yuletide it was a time of reversals. Our ultra-capitalist society regards looking after the poor with horror gift-giving 364 days of the year—and then welcomes it on the 365th. Roman society observed a strict order in master-slave relations—until Saturnalia, when masters would serve slaves. Saturnalia featured banqueting and gift-giving—and so does our modern Xmas. It is hard to kill a holiday. The puritans tried to kill Xmas—and when that didn’t work, their spiritual descendants worked to christianize the hell out of it.

So, anyway, io Saturnalia, everybody. Io, bona Saturnalia!

Celebration of a Golden Age

And it’s now the second day of Saturnalia, that old-time Roman feast where masters and slaves changed places and presents and feasting were the order of the day. I had a piece partly written with those pedantic references to forgotten authors that you’ve come to expect, but my system crashed and nothing seems to be left of it. Sic transit and all that. I don’t know that I care, really; maybe next year I’ll manage to do something a bit more coherent. Or not. At this point I’m tired and I really don’t care.

According to Macrobius (I think it was) what was originally a one day festival (17 December) got expanded to seven days in part due to the calendar change introduced by Julius Caesar in 9955 HE (46 BCE) on the advice of the shadowy Sosigenes of Alexandria. You see, he expanded December from 29 to 31 days and thus threw off the date of Saturnalia, which was originally fixed at 14 days before the Kalends of January, but then changed to 16 days before the Kalends. Some people continued to celebrate the XIIII Kal Jan date, now 19 December, while others the XVI Kal Jan date (17 December), and with two dates for Saturnalia it’s easy to see how the 18th got thrown in as a kind of bonus, like the Friday after Thanksgiving in the good old USA. But this doesn’t explain the extension for another four days, unless maybe people just plain felt that after getting the autumn field work done, it was time for a party.

It matters not. Personally I don’t trust ancient explanations of ancient feasts; they all have the stench of ad-hocery about them. I doubt very much that the ancients knew that much more about them than we do; their origins were probably as lost to them as to us.

The thing about Saturnalia, though, is the evocation of a long-lost Golden Age, presided over by Saturn, where distinctions of rank did not exist, where the earth gave forth its abundance without the need of labor, where justice reigned. A time before Prometheus brought fire to man or Pandora opened that goddamn box.

In a way, I suppose, there was a golden age. Gold is one of the easiest metals to work, and one of the first discoveries in metallurgy must have been the magic of gold. It’s not the most useful of metals, but damn is it pretty. And it’s not like the other rocks. The discovery could even have been pre-agricultural, when hunters and gatherers roamed the earth, and division of labor was pretty much restricted to the gender division that humankind seems to have had from before the beginning. Distinctions of rank may have depended on who was the strongest, or who had the most success in the hunt, or the gather, or whatever. A golden age of sorts, though not exactly, well, Eden.

The mythical golden age is much cooler, and it’s hard to fault the attempts to recreate it with that peace-on-earth good-will-toward-men spirit that was the stuff of Saturnalia. Present-giving, candle-lighting, gambling, free speech, masters waiting on their slaves—good times, good times. But it isn’t real, and when Saturnalia ends, all that stuff goes back in the box till the next year. Still, as Statius observed:

For how many years shall this festival abide! Never shall age destroy so holy a day! While the hills of Latium remain and father Tiber, while thy Rome stands and the Capitol thou hast restored to the world, it shall continue.

Saturnalia, Festivus, and Others

All right, I’ve managed to miss Saturnalia (17-23 December), the Islamic New Year (18 December), the last day of Hanukkah (19 December), the Solstice (21 December), old St. Thomas Day (21 December), HumanLight (23 December), and Festivus (23 December). The Islamic New Year is a wanderer that just happens this year to fall during Yuletide; the Islamic calendar is entirely lunar with no reference to the solar year, and so its holidays wander about, but the others are all solidly part of the season. The Solstice, with its longest night of the year, is the real reason for the celebration, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere where the bulk of these traditions originated. As the days get shorter and the nights get longer it’s hard not to start feeling oppressed. While even the most primitive of people must have noticed that the days eventually started getting longer again, it must still have been a relief to them when that dark corner was finally turned.

Much about the season is explicable as symbolic reminders that warmth and summer sunlight would eventually return. Evergreen branches recall the lush vegetation of spring and summer; the candles and lamps recall the great light of the sun and herald its eventual return, feasting and merriment in the cold barren wasteland give the finger to the ice and snow. And given the tendency winter has toward depression and despair, feasting and present-giving and lights and greenery probably offset the lurch to desolation.

But what about the other great theme of the year, the inversion of the social order? That’s of course Saturnalia’s special province—master and slave changing places and all that. But the Christian Christmas didn’t abandon that—far from it. Even setting aside the Boy Bishop frolics and all that, the whole damn season is one gigantic reversal of the normal order of things. For the rest of the year a sort of horribly perverse version of the laws of thermodynamics prevails—the economic law that says that no matter how much effort you put into something, you’re still screwed. Come Christmas all that gets set aside, and suddenly we give gifts to our fellow human beings, not counting the cost, not expecting anything in return. It is the exact antithesis of the capitalism by which we set our clocks the other three hundred odd days of the year. It is a perversion, or at least an inversion, of our most basic cultural values, and damned if we don’t make the most of it.

About Festivus and HumanLight, both celebrated 23 December, I know nothing; the former involves the display of an unadorned aluminum pole, and the latter involves lighting candles. Both are relatively recent inventions; the former was popularized by a TV show, Seinfeld, that as it happens I’ve never seen, and the latter appears to have been celebrated by a select group for the past decade or so. Both are intended as inclusive secular celebrations of the season, as opposed to what Garrison Keillor assures us is the for-Xians-Only festival of Xmas. Located midway between the Solstice and Christmas, each offers an alternative vision of the season, one not dependent on believing six impossible things before breakfast. I like the inclusive aspect; I don’t think I care much for the “Airing of Grievances” that is a traditional part of Festivus, but it ain’t a deal-breaker as far as I’m concerned.