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Iwo ROMAN FESTIVALS: the SATURNALIA and LUPERCALIA

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Iwo ROMAN FESTIVALS: the SATURNALIA and LUPERCALIA ENCOUNTERING THE PAST Iwo ROMAN FESTIVALS: THE SATURNALIA AND LUPERCALIA he Romans loved festivals, and their calen dar contained many of them. The most fa T mous celebrations were the Lupercalia, on February 15, and the Saturnalia, which took place from December 17 to 24. Both festivals were so popular that Christianity later adopted them under different names for its own religious calendar. The Saturnalia celebrated Saturn, an agricultur al god. (Our Saturday is named after him.) During this festival all public and private business gave way to feasting, gambling, wild dancing, and the kind of revelry that still occurs today during Mardi Gras in cities like New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. During the Saturnalia, masters permitted slaves to say and do what they liked; moral restrictions were eased; and Romans exchanged presents. Rather than try to abolish the Saturnalia, Chris tianity established December 25th as the birth date of Jesus, and the irrepressible Roman holiday, including the giving of presents, parties, and elabo rate meals, became the celebration of Christmas. The Lupercalia was dedicated, in part, to Faunus, the ancient Italian god of the countryside. Worshipped as the bringer of fertility to fields and flocks, Faunus was typically represented in art as half man, half goat and was associated with merri ment like the Greek god Pan. On the day of the Lupercalia, young male priests called Luperci sacrificed goats and a dog to Faunus. The Luperci then ran naked around the city, strik ing any woman who came near them with a thong cut from the skins of the sacrificed goats to render her fertile. Women who had not conceived or who wanted more children made sure that the Luperci This bronze statuette of the It the Lupercalia of 44 B.C.E is a struck them. was at ancient Italian rural deity Faunus, that the consul Marcus Antonius (Shakespeare’s whom the Romans identified with Mark Antony) offered a royal crown to Julius Cae the Greek god Pan. Christi Graham sar. In 494 C.E., the Christian church converted the and Nick Nicholls © The British Museum festival into the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Why do you think the Romans loved these fes tivals? Why might the Christian Church have chosen to adapt pagan customs instead of try ing abolish them? 124 126 PART 1 • The FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD CHAPTER 4 • ROME: FROM RIPULIC TO EMPIRE 127 WOMEN’S UPRISING IN REPUBLICAN ROME In 195 B.C.E., Roman women staged a rare public political protest when they de lectively. But from no class is there not the “If they win in this, manded the repeal of a law passed two decades earlier during the Second Punic War, greatest danger if you permit them meetings what will they not at tempt? Review all which they believed limited their rights unfairly. Livy (59 3. G.E—i 7 G.E.) describes the and secret consultations the laws with which your forefathers restrained affair and the response of the traditionalist Marcus Porcius Cato (234—149 B.c.E.). “I should have said, ‘What sort their licence and made of practice is them subject to their this, of running out into the streets and husbands; even with all • Why did the women complain? How did they try to achieve their goals? Which of blocking these bonds the roads and speaking to other you can scarcely control them. Cato’s objections to their behavior do you think were most important? Since women women’s hus What of bands? Could you not have this? If you suffer them to seize these did not vote or sit in assemblies, why did the affair end as it did? made the same re bonds one quests, each of your own by one and wrench themselves free husband, at home? and finally And yet, not even at to be placed on a parity with their home, if modesty would husbands, mid the anxieties of great wars, either the state, when the private fortunes of all men keep matrons within the limits do you think that you will be able to of their proper endure them? scarce finished or soon to come, an inci were daily increasing, they should allow the rights, did it become you to The moment they begin to be A Concern yourselves your equals, dent occurred, trivial to relate, but which, by woman too to have their former distinctions re with the question of what they will be your superiors.” laws should be adopt The next reason of the passions it aroused, developed into stored. The crowd of women grew larger day by ed in this place or repealed.’ day an even greater crowd of women Our ancestors per appeared in a violent contention. TwoJ tribunes of the peo day; for they were now coming in from the mitted no woman to public, and all of them in a body conduct even personal beset ple, proposed to the assembly the abrogation of towns and rural districts. Soon they dared even business without the doors of those tribunes, who were ve a guardian to intervene in her toing the Oppian law. The tribune Gaius Oppius had to approach and appeal to the consuls, the prae behalf; they wished them their colleagues’ proposal, and they did to be under the con not desist until carried this law in the heat of the Punic War, tors, and the other officials, but one consul, at trol of fathers, brothers, husbands; the threat of veto was with we (Heaven drawn by the tribunes. that no woman should possess more than half least, they found adamant, Marcus Porcius help us!) allow them now even to After that there was no interfere in question that all the an ounce of gold or wear a parti-coloured gar Cato, who spoke thus in favour of the law public affairs, yes, and to visit the tribes would vote to repeal Forum and the law. The law ment or ride in a carriage in the City or in a whose repeal was being urged: our informal and formal sessions. was repealed twenty years after Give loose it was passed. town within a mile thereof, except on the occa “If each of us, citizens, had determined to as rein to their uncontrollable nature and to this sion of a religious festival . .tTjhe Capitoline sert his rights and dignity as a husband with ‘re untamed creature and expect that they will was filled with crowds of supporters and oppo spect to his own spouse’, we should have less themselves set bounds to their licence; unless nents of the ill. The matrons could not be kept trouble with the sex as a whole; as it is, our lib you act, this is the least of the things enjoined at home by . their husbands’ orders, but erty, destroyed at home by female violence, upon women by custom or law and to which even here in the Forum crushed they blocked all the streets and approaches to the is and trodden I submit with a feeling of injustice. It is forum, begging the men as they came down to underfoot, and because we have not kept them complete liberty or, rather, if we wish to speak from the Forum that, in the prosperous condition of individually under control, we dread them coY the truth, Livy, trans. by Evan T. Stage Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard complete licence that they desire. University Press, 1935), XXXIV, i—ui; viii, pp. 413—419, 439. Greek and Latin literature as his subject matter. man. Some, like the great orator Cicero, undertook among boys in the late republic. Young women did pher’s lesson: He also taught dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, as what we might call postgraduate study by travel not study with “moderation is necessary even for intellec philosophers and rhetoricians, for tuals.” And, if she still wants to appear educated tronomy, and music. Sometimes he included the ing abroad to study with great teachers of rhetoric they were usually quent, and elo married by the age at which the let her dress as a man, sacrifice to men’s gods and men bathe in the elements of rhetoric, especially for those boys who and philosophy in the Greek world. were pursuing their higher education. Still, men’s baths. Wives shouldn’t try to be pub would not go on to a higher education. This style of education broadened the Romans’ some women continued their lic speakers; they shouldn’t use rhetorical devices; they education and be shouldn’t read At sixteen, some boys went on to advanced understanding through the careful study of a for came prose writers all the classics—there should be some or poets. By the first century things women don’t study in rhetoric. The instructors were usually eign language and culture. It made them a part of C.E., there were understand. I myself cannot under apparently enough learned women stand a woman who can quote the rules Greek. They trained their charges by studying the older and wider culture of the Hellenistic to provoke of grammar and the complaints of a crotchety and con never make a mistake and cites obscure, long-forgotten models of fine past and servative poets—as if speech of the by having world, a world they had come to dominate and Satirist: men cared about such things. If she has to them write, memorize, and declaim speeches suit needed to understand. correct somebody let her correct her girl friends Still more exasperating is the woman leave and able for different occasions.
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