3.5 Saturnalia

Saturnalia was the festival of the god Saturn.

The feast began on December 17, already centuries before Caesar. Saturnalia was, at earlier times, the celebration of the end of agricultural work in late autumn.

People remembered the age of the creation of agriculture, the old “golden age” ruled in Roman mythology by the god Saturn. It was a work break and a folk amusement with music, dancing, eating, drinking, and gambling. Family members, friends and close acquaintances gave each other presents, just as we do at Christmas. People played a “reverse world”, a “role reversal”. The enslaved people became masters; the masters served their slaves, etc.

God Saturn was more than the “creator” of the “golden age”; he was also the god of time, the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Chronos. Chronos was the son of Uranus, and he was the leader of the Titans and the father of the Roman equivalent of the Greek Zeus, Jupiter.

In the days of Saturnalia, people also overcame their fear of the darkness of winter. They waited anxiously until the wheel of time had turned completely, the winter solstice, which brought them the sun’s rebirth.

Saturnalia fell some days before the winter solstice (WIS) and was associated with the traditional Roman sun cult. Saturnalia was gradually celebrated longer and longer, up to 7 days, until the day of WIS. In 45BC, the Date of WIS was 23. December, according to the new Julian Calendar.

The Romans had worshipped the sun god Apollo since the founding of the city of Rome. The “many-sided” Greek Apollo (son of Zeus) and the Etruscan Apulu served as models. They later created their own main sun god, Sol. The sun god Sol can be considered the “united” Roman equivalent of the sun gods of the conquered territories, the ancient Greek Helios, the eastern (originally Persian) Mithras and the Egyptian Re.

They built temples and celebrated in honour of their sun gods, but especially important was the Winter Solstice (WIS), the symbolic rebirth of the sun.

The cult of the sun was restored and strengthened by Emperor Augustus. Augustus was the “son of the sun” and regarded the sun as his symbol.

With the increasing importance of the sun, in AD274, Sol Invictus, the “invincible sun” festival, was set for December 25 (Mithras’ birthday). The Roman sun cult even survived the official toleration of Christianity for many decades (AD313, “Edict of Milan” by Constantine I; Constantine the Great).

People experienced the flaws of the old calendar, as the Date of Saturnalia moved away from the easily observable astronomical phenomenon, the winter solstice (WIS), and even from the winter itself.

It was crucial to bring Saturnalia back to its original position just a few days before the winter solstice.

Despite the drifts during the old, flawed calendars, people kept the dates of various old holidays, while those became independent of their original astronomical meaning. For this purpose, they could use the order and the distance in days of the various holidays.

Let us compare the distance measured in days between the first day of Saturnalia and the Hilaria day of the following year in the old Roman and new Julian calendars, according to Table 1.

In the old calendar, 12 days (29-17) have passed from the day of Saturnalia to the end of December. Add to this the days in January (29), the days in February (28) and the days until March 25. In total: 12+29+28+25= 94 days in the old calendar.

In the new Julian calendar, December and January were 2 days longer than before. So, there are 14 days between December 17 and the end of December, and 31 days have passed in January instead of 29. With formula: 94-14-31-28 = 21.

Namely: 17 December + 94 days = 21. March in the new calendar.

The old March 25 (the unimportant Hilaria-VEQ) was automatically “pushed back” by 4 days to March 21 in the new calendar by adjusting and redefining the time relationship between Saturnalia and WIS. Therefore, the Date corresponding to March 25 in the republican calendar has automatically become 21. March in Caesar’s new calendar.

There are further indirect shreds of evidence that VEQ may have fallen on March 21 in the Julian calendar’s first year, but calendar researchers have ignored these. The First Council of Nicaea set the Date of the VEQ to calculate the Easter tables on March 21, and Pope Gregory XIII also set the VEQ date for March 21 in his Gregorian calendar (see later). Both determinations could have opted for a different day. So, I find it possible that both the bishops of Nicaea and Pope Gregory XIII knew that VEQ in the Julian calendar initially fell on March 21.

My point in the above arguments was to clarify that there was no reason to intentionally set the VEQ date to a specific date in the new calendar. The VEQ day of the Julian calendar was automatically moved from the old, and in Rome, that time unimportant date, March 25, to a new date, March 21. Caesar’s priority in the calendar reform was to restore the Saturnalia. However, this also put the WIS in its old and astronomically proper place. The reform provided an opportunity to place the first Kalendae of the new calendar on January 1, on a visible new moon day. Because of the Metonic cycle, this was only possible once every 19 years.