We are next to look for an historical case of the yearly sacrifice,
not of a king, but of a mock-king. The argument thus carries us to
the Roman feast of the Saturnalia. This festival (in late times held
in December, 16-23) so closely resembled our Christmas in jollity,
that Pliny (like some of us) used to withdraw to the most retired
room in his Laurentine villa to escape the noise. Mr. Frazer does not
remark the circumstance, but in Rome before the Empire, or earlier,
the Saturnalia seem to have been a feast of one day only. 'Among our
ancestors,' says Macrobius, 'the Saturnalia were completed in a single
day,' though he does not seem very certain of his fact. Livy says:
'The Saturnalia were instituted as a festal day.'[57] After the time
of Caligula, the Saturnalia endured for five days, 'precisely like the
feast of the Sacæa at Babylon,' of which we are fated to hear a great
deal.[58]
It would thus appear that the Saturnalia were originally a feast of
one day, later lengthened to five days, and again to seven days. By
the time of writers like Lucian and Martial the feast continued for
a week, and Lucian represents Cronos (Saturn) as a jolly old king of
unreason.[59] The rich helped the poor, people made presents to each
other, 'a Christmas carol philosophy,' as Dickens calls it, prevailed.
The masters served the slaves at table; all was licence and riot. Wax
candles were given as presents (_cerea_), like those on our Christmas
trees. These _cerea_, according to Macrobius, were thought by some
antiquaries to be substitutes for human sacrifices. Originally, it was
said, the Pelasgi, before migrating to Italy, received an oracle from
Dodona:
Τῷ πατρί πέμπετε Φῶτα
'Send a man to the Father,' that is, to the god Cronos or, in Italy,
Saturn. But, by a pun on the Greek _Φῶτα_, they were induced to
substitute lights, the wax candles.[60]
Now it is a really astonishing thing that, if actual human sacrifices
were offered after our era, at the Saturnalia, no Roman antiquary
(and there were plenty of antiquaries) should mention the fact, while
discussing the theory that _cerea_ were commutations of sacrifice. If,
now and then, under the Empire a survival or recrudescence of human
sacrifice was heard of in a rural district, the antiquaries would catch
at it greedily, as a proof that wax tapers really were commutations
of human sacrifice, which some doubted. That rural recrudescences do
occur we know from the recent case of burning an Irish peasant woman to
death, to deliver her from a fairy.[61]
Mr. Frazer, however, believes that survivals of human sacrifices at the
Saturnalia did really occur. He is 'tempted to surmise' that the king
of the revels (who answered to our 'Twelfth Night' 'King' or 'Queen of
the Bean') 'may have originally personated Saturn himself.'[62] In the
following page we read that the victim 'cut his own throat on the altar
of the god whom he personated.' The only known or alleged instance of
human sacrifice at the Saturnalia follows.
In A.D. 303, when the persecution under Diocletian began, one Dasius,
a Christian soldier, in Lower Mœsia, is said to have been the victim
whom the soldiers yearly chose for the mock-king of a _month_, not a
week, the Saturn of the occasion. Why a month, if the ancient feast
lasted but a day, and, later, but a week? After being a merry monarch
for thirty days, he should have cut his own throat at the altar of
Saturn (_Κρόνος_, in the Greek MSS.).[63] Dasius declined the crown
and was knocked on the head, on November 20, by a soldier, apparently
a christened man, named John. The Saturnalia at Rome lasted (at least
under the Empire) from December 16 to December 23. Dasius must have
been executed for his refusal, announced before his _month's_ reign
(only a week is elsewhere known) should have begun--on November 23;
if the regnal month ended on December 23. Thus the festive Saturnalian
kings at Rome may be guessed to descend from a custom, at Rome unknown,
but surviving among the soldiers, of killing a mock-king Saturnus.
Dasius was no slave or criminal, but himself a soldier. The revels of
a month, in place of a day or a week, must also, one presumes, be a
survival, though a day was the early limit. The date of the MSS. about
Dasius Mr. Frazer does not give, but he thinks that the longest MS. is
'probably based on official documents.' To the MSS. I shall return.
The grotesque figure of Carnival, destroyed at the end of a modern
Roman feast which does not fall in December, is also a survival of a
slain mock-king 'who personated Saturn,' so Mr. Frazer suggests, though
in ancient Rome even this carnival practice is to us unknown.[64]
It will already have been observed that even if the Romans were, in
some remote age, wont yearly to sacrifice a mock-king who represented
a god, they did not do so at Easter, as in the case of Christ, did not
do so in spring, and did not scourge the victim. Their rite, if it
really corresponded to that of the soldiers who slew Dasius, began
in November, and ended in December, lasting thirty days, or, _teste
Macrobio_, originally lasting one day. If the slaying of Dasius really
occurred, and was a survival of a custom once prevalent (as in ancient
Anahuac), then the early Saturnalia lasted for a month, from November
23 to December 23; but Roman antiquaries knew nothing of this. The
month date is remote indeed from Easter, so Mr. Frazer must try to show
that originally the Saturnalia were a spring festival, like carnival.
To make the carnival and Saturnalia coincide, Mr. Frazer points out
that 'if the Saturnalia, like many other seasons of licence, was always
observed at the end of the old year or the beginning of the new one,
it must, like the carnival, have been originally held in February
or March, at the time when March was the first month of the Roman
year.'[65] Thus, in conservative rural districts, the Saturnalia would
continue to be held in February, not, as at Rome, in December, though
Roman writers do not tell us so, and though non-Roman pagan peoples
held festival at the winter solstice. The soldiers who killed poor
Dasius were ultra-conservative, but they killed him in November, when
their month of Saturnalia began, not in February, when, as they held by
old usage, their Saturnalia should have been kept. The hypothesis may
be stated thus:
1. In rural districts 'the older and sterner practice' of murder may
long have survived.[66]
2. In rural districts the Saturnalia continued to be held in
February-March, not in December.[67]
3. Therefore the soldiers, who kept up 'the older and sterner practice'
of remote districts where the Saturnalia fell in February-March, killed
Dasius--in November!
4. Meanwhile, so wedded were the rural districts to Saturnalia in
February-March, that the feast continued in these months under the
Church and became our carnival.
5. The eclectic soldiers in Lower Mœsia kept up the _old_ killing and
full month of revelry (though we never hear of a full month in older or
later Rome), but they accepted the _new_ date, November (not kept in
Rome) and December; though in their remote rural homes the Saturnalia
were in February-March. Doubtless their officers insisted on the new
official date, while permitting the old month of revel and the human
sacrifice. Yet, apparently, of old there was but one day of revel.
But is the story of St. Dasius a true story? The editor and discoverer
of the Greek text in which the legend occurs at full length, Professor
Franz Cumont of Ghent, at first held that as far as the sacrifice
of the military mock-king goes the story is false. I have already
observed that Mr. Frazer says nothing about the date of the Greek
MS. containing the longest legend of Dasius. M. Cumont does. The MS.
is of the eleventh century of our era, and the original narrative,
he thinks, was done into Greek out of the Latin, which may have been
based on official documents, before the end of the seventh century[68]
A.D., by some one who knew Latin ill, wrote execrable Greek, did not
understand his subject, and was far from scrupulous. These sentiments
of M. Cumont 'set in a new and lurid light'--as Mr. Frazer says of
something else---the only evidence for the yearly military sacrifice
of a mock-king of the Saturnalia. Our author was unscrupulous, for he
makes Dasius profess the Nicene Creed before it was made. As to the
thirty days' revel, M. Cumont supposes _that_ to be a blunder of our
author, who did not know that the Saturnalia only occupied a week.[69]
M. Cumont held that the king of the feast had not to slay himself, but
only to sacrifice to Saturn; in fact, Bassus, his commanding officer,
does ask him, in the legend, to 'sacrifice to our gods, whom even the
barbarians worship.' Dasius, the MS. says, refused, and was knocked on
the head by a soldier named John. 'John' was likely to be a Christian,
and M. Cumont suggests that the ignorant translator of the Latin took
'sepultus est' ('he was buried' by a soldier named John) for 'pulsus,'
or 'depulsus est,' 'he was knocked on the head' (_ἐκρούσθη._) In
fact the Greek translator of the seventh century retouched his Latin
original _à plaisir_. Human sacrifices, says M. Cumont, had been
abolished since Hadrian's time. The soldiers, if they sacrificed a
mock-king, broke an imperial edict.[70]
Our evidence then would seem, if M. Cumont is right, to be that of an
unfaithful and not very scrupulous translator and embellisher of a
Latin text. He informs us by the way that similar noisy performances
went on in his own Christian period, not in December, but on New
Year's Day. The Saturnalia were thus pushed on a week from December
23; we do not learn that they were transferred to, or retained at,
February-March. The moral lesson of the legend is that we must not be
noisy on New Year's Day.
Thus M. Cumont did not at first accept the evidence for the annual
sacrifice of a mock-king representing the god Saturn. But M. Parmentier
suggested that an old cruel rite might have been introduced by Oriental
soldiers into Mœsia (303 A.D.) thanks to the licensed ferocity of the
persecutions under Diocletian. The victim, Dasius, was a Christian,
and the author of his legend told the tale to illustrate the sin of
revelry on New Year's Day. But what led to the revival of the cruelty?
M. Parmentier quoted the story of our Babylonian festival, the Sacæa,
in which a mock-king was scourged and slain. This or a similar rite
the Roman legions finally confused with their own Saturnalia, both as
to date and as to characteristics. The Oriental soldiers of the Roman
Empire imported into the army this Oriental feast and sacrifice: just
as they brought monuments of Mithra-worship into Mœsia. In an hour of
military licence and of persecution, the cohorts in Mœsia may actually
have tried to sacrifice a Christian private as a representative of King
Saturn.
So far the sacrifice is an Asiatic importation, not a Roman survival.
But M. Cumont, after reading M. Parmentier, returned from his disbelief
in the veracity of the Dasius legend. He thought that the extension of
the Saturnalia from one day to five days, after Caligula, might be due
to an imitation introduced by Eastern slaves in Rome (an influential
class) of the five days' feast of the Babylonian Sacæa. But thirty
days, as in Mœsia, are not five days. He also inclined to accept
the recently proposed identification of the Sacæa with a really old
Babylonian feast called _Zagmuk_, or Zakmuk, and with the Jewish Purim,
an identification which we shall later criticise. As to the imperial
edict forbidding human sacrifice, M. Cumont now suggested that it
had become a dead letter and impotent. In the general decadence of
303 monstrous cruelties flourished, and the Saturnalia were marked
by gladiatorial combats. Thus, in remote Mœsia, the half Oriental
soldiery might really sacrifice a Christian 'for the safety of his
comrades under arms.'
So far the sacrifice of Dasius looks rather like a cruelty introduced
into decadent Rome, and at the good-humoured Saturnalia, by Oriental
legionaries, than like a Roman survival or recrudescence of a regular
original feature of the Saturnalia. In any case the stripping and
scourging of the Sacæan mock-king, his hanging, and his simulated
resurrection (at which we shall find Mr. Frazer making a guess) are
absent, while the date of the alleged transaction (November-December)
does not tally with Purim, or Eastertide, or the date of the Sacæa.
The duration of the Dasius feast, thirty days, is neither Roman nor
Oriental. Thus, far from illuminating the Oriental practice, the rite
reported in Mœsia does but make the problem more perplexing. The
evidence has all the faults possible, and the conjecture that the Greek
writer invented the sacrifice, to throw discredit on the New Year
revels of his contemporaries, may be worth considering.
Perhaps I may hint that I think the historical evidence of the author
of the Dasius legend so extremely dubious that I might have expected
Mr. Frazer to offer a criticism of its character. The general reader
can gather from the 'Golden Bough' no idea of the tenuity of the
testimony, which, of course, is at once visible to readers of French
and Greek. We address ourselves to scholars, and for scholars Mr.
Frazer has provided the necessary citations, but my heart inclines to
regard the needs of the general reader. (Cf. 'Man,' May 1901, No. 53.)