From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less,
to Saturn in Rome, though how much of the resemblance is due to Roman
varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian
festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February,
nor March, but in July.[71] Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that
the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring
festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another
hypothesis) were _originally_ in February or March, though of this we
have no proof. Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace
to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in
the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia
in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off
three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new
year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the
Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not
shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at
the winter solstice.
As proof that the Attic feast of Cronos (supposed to answer to the
Saturnalia) was originally in spring, not in July, Mr. Frazer writes:
'A cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months
of the year, was offered to Cronos by the Athenians on the fifteenth
day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March,
and there are traces of a licence accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac
festival of the opening of the wine jars,' in the month of flowers
preceding.[72] It was a proper season for licence.
The possible meaning of the cake does not go for much, and Cronos is
not Dionysus. There was a spring festival of Cronos at Olympia, and
Aug. Mommsen thinks that the Athenian Cronos feast was originally
vernal, though Athenian tradition thought it was a harvest feast.[73]
The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he
has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to
Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been
sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence
is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos,
who certainly received many such offerings.
We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted
from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the
kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to
us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is
singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally
with the June-July date of the Persian Sacæa, as given by Mr. Frazer
(and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74] But in his
third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sacæa about
Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument
might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest
feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]
How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of
licence like the Sacæa usually occur just after harvest, the real time
of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a
feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76]
But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast
removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sacæa
in June-July. On the other hand, the conjecture that the Sacæa were
vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other
conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal
Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.