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.)
VI. THE GREEK CRONIA
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]