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Content (Issue 8)
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IO SATURNALIA – EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY!
‘It is now the month of December,’ wrote Seneca, ‘when the greatest part of the city is in a bustle. Loose reins are given to public dissipation…’ He feels bound to disapprove somewhat, but Seneca does offers to throw off his toga and tuck into a good supper - unlike Pliny the Younger (the prig you hope won’t come to stay), who used to hide in his room and just let everyone else get on with the fun. Falco, who both loathes and loves family life, is bound to have mixed feelings, of course, even before he is landed with much worse visitors than Pliny… Really, I can’t believe I left it so long to tackle this wonderful aspect of Roman life! Researching can be more fun than you expect. For instance I found the most interesting discussion of Caligula’s ships at Lake Nemi was in an Internet site called Afloat (‘Australia’s No 1 FREE marine publication’) which every month has articles like ‘Rogue’s Yarn (by Harry Driftwood) and ‘Galley Gourmet’ (by Captain Chaos). And I ended up actually cooking in my galley this time, as you’ll see. We all have preconceptions about how our modern Christmas developed, partly as a combination of European folk myths – Saint Nicholas and those Victorian traditions we owe to Prince Albert – and partly the Christian Nativity which conveniently adopted Saturnalia, by pragmatically adjusting the birthday of Jesus in order to exploit what had been the most popular festival of the pagan world. Roman Saturnalia itself had earlier roots; the Babylonians, Persians and Egyptians all celebrated December holidays. The Egyptians decorated their homes with palm fronds, whose twelve shoots referred to the twelve months of the year and may be connected with the ‘Twelve Days’ of our Christmas. Their holiday was twelve days too – though the Romans fiddled about with this: it had been seven days, but Augustus miserably confined it to three to curtail the public holiday in the courts, then Caligula stretched it back to five. Most people seem to have taken a week regardless, so I went with that. Feasting at the dead of winter is understandable, while the pause in the winter solstice between harvest and seed-sowing would be the one time people in farming communities could afford to relax – leading to the concept of Misrule: slaves can be given a brief respite from their labours, pretending they are equal to their masters, and those masters can relax too, joining in the romp if they are prepared to do it. How convenient for me that this is the point in his career where Falco can afford to start buying slaves as domestic help, and that he is bound to be finding it difficult to control them satisfactorily even before they fling themselves wholeheartedly into domestic Misrule! I was surprised how many traditions we still keep in recognisable form: the little earthenware figurines called ‘Sigillaria’ that people gave as presents, the green decorations and strings of lights, the cake, the visits to friends, the often riotous family gatherings. Other things are not recorded, but I reckon they can be deduced: all those extra lights and candles must have made it a nightmare for the vigiles in their role as the fire brigade, just as Christmas can be harrowing for fire-fighters today. Whether the vigiles cohorts held Saturnalia drinks parties, and whether their merriment formed the hellish model for unruly office parties, I leave to your judgement – but if they did, then trust me, provision of the catering would have been a hot topic. I do not think I would have hired Flora’s Caupona – but I have been to plenty of parties where some poor volunteer did something similar, and only learned their mistake when it was far too late. We have all been there, haven’t we? And bought Mother the wrong present, even though she thought she’d dropped a hint… What I like in writing about the Romans is that I can present them as just as human as we are - nowhere more so than in Saturnalia, their favourite festival!
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