Life in ancient Rome was turned upside down every December when the festival of Saturnalia took over, writes historian Sarah Clegg

In the mid-first century, Pliny wrote about the perfection of his villa on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Among his boasts of violet-scented terraces and a heated swimming bath he mentions his peaceful suite of rooms, and how he’s especially grateful that they’re well soundproofed during the festival of Saturnalia when:

the rest of the roof resounds with cries of the holiday freedom, for I am not disturbing my household’s merrymaking nor they my work.

Saturnalia – the feast of the god Saturn – started on 17 December, and by the time Pliny was writing, it lasted for seven days and was one of the biggest celebrations of the Roman calendar.

The more you read about the festivities that accompanied it, the less surprising it feels that Pliny might have wanted to hide somewhere quiet for its duration. According to his near-contemporary Seneca, it was a time when “licence had been granted to public self-indulgence”, and everyone was “drunk and vomiting”, giving in to excess and luxury with wild abandon. People gave gifts, but they were often gag gifts, so that the emperor Augustus himself was apparently giving people “nothing but hair, cloth, sponges, pokers and tongs, and other such things under misleading names of double meaning”.

Normal societal rules were suspended, so that gambling, usually illegal, was allowed and hierarchies were switched and swapped, so that during the Saturnalia slaves were served a feast by their masters, and given “licence” to speak freely. They were also allowed to recline to eat – stretching out on the long couches that were, for most of the year, the preserve of male citizens.

Meanwhile men stopped wearing togas, and instead put on an item of Greek clothing called a “synthesis” – we don’t know too much about how this garment looked, but it does seem to have been colourful and it was certainly out of the ordinary. Citizens and slaves alike also donned a “pilleus”, a type of cap that was normally worn only by freed slaves, so that a social status that had previously been obvious from clothing alone was, at least partially, obscured.

But if one set of hierarchies was pulled down, another one was put up in its place. Often via games of knuckle-bones or dice, groups of friends would elect a “king of Saturnalia”. This king was “absolute monarch” for the duration of the festivities, and would issue commands that their little group of subjects would have to obey, ordering their friends to do everything from shouting insulting lies about themselves to dancing naked. Even emperors played this game – Nero himself was once elected the king of Saturnalia (and used the occasion to humiliate his step-brother by forcing him to sing in front of a drunken crowd). According to Lucian, writing in the second century, Saturnalia was a time of:

Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.

This is an extract from The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas (Granta, £10.99) by Sarah Clegg. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Sarah Clegg (below) is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday, when she’ll be talking about the darker side of Christmas.

Thursday 4 December, 6-7pm. Click here to book – it’s FREE to subscribers.

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