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his authority. He curbed Saturnalia’s

subversive tendencies by marking

it with public events under his con-

trol. The poet Statius (AD 45- 95), in

his poem Silvae, describes the lavish

banquet and entertainments Domitian

presided over, including games which

opened with sweets, fruit and nuts

showered on the crowd and featur-

ing flights of flamingos released over

Rome. Shows with fighting dwarves

and female gladiators were illuminat-

ed, for the first time, into the night.

The conversion of Emperor Constan-

tine to Christianity in AD 312 ended

Roman persecution of Christians and

began imperial patronage of the Chris-

tian churches. But Christianity did not

become the Roman Empire’s official

religion overnight. Dr David Gwynn,

lecturer in ancient and late antique his-

tory at Royal Holloway, University of

London, says that, alongside Christian

and other pagan festivals, ‘the Satur-

nalia continued to be celebrated in the

century afterward’.

The poet Ambrosius Theodosius Mac-

robius wrote another Saturnalia, de-

scribing a banquet of pagan literary

celebrities in Rome during the festival.

Classicists date the work to between

AD 383 and 430, so it describes a Sat-

urnalia alive and well under Christian

emperors. The Christian calendar of

Polemius Silvus, written around AD

449, mentions Saturnalia, recording

that ‘it used to honour the god Saturn’.

This suggests it had by then become

just another popular carnival.

Christmas apparently started – like

Saturnalia – in Rome, and spread to

the eastern Mediterranean. The earli-

est known reference to it commemo-

rating the birth of Christ on December

25th is in the Roman Philocalian cal-

endar of AD 354. Provincial schisms

soon resulted in different Christian cal-

endars. The Orthodox Church in the

Eastern (Byzantine) half of the Roman

Empire fixed the date of Christmas at

January 6th, commemorating simul-

taneously Christ’s birth, baptism and

first miracle.

Saturnalia has a rival contender as the

forerunner of Christmas: the festival

of dies natalis solis invicti, ‘birthday of

the unconquered sun’. The Philocalian

calendar also states that December

25th was a Roman civil holiday hon-

ouring the cult of sol invicta. With its

origins in Syria and the monotheistic

cult of Mithras, sol invicta certainly

has similarities to the worship of Je-

sus. The cult was introduced into the

empire in AD 274 by Emperor Aureli-

an (214-275), who effectively made it

a state religion, putting its emblem on

Roman coins.

Sol invicta succeeded because of its

ability to assimilate aspects of Jupiter

and other deities into its figure of the

Sun King, reflecting the absolute pow-

er of ‘divine’ emperors. But despite

efforts by later pagan emperors to

control Saturnalia and absorb the fes-

tival into the official cult, the sol invicta

ended up looking very much like the

old Saturnalia. Constantine, the first

Christian emperor, was brought up in

the sol invicta cult, in what was by then

already a predominantly monotheist

empire: ‘It is therefore possible,’ says

Dr Gwynn, ‘that Christmas was intend-

ed to replace this festival rather than

Saturnalia.’

Gwynn concludes: ‘The majority of

modern scholars would be reluctant to

accept any close connection between

the Saturnalia and the emergence of

the Christian Christmas.’

Devout Christians will be reassured to

learn that the date of Christmas may

derive from concepts in Judaism that

link the time of the deaths of proph-

ets being linked to their conception or

birth. From this, early ecclesiastical

number-crunchers extrapolated that

the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy

following the Annunciation on March

25th would produce a December 25th

date for the birth of Christ.