Curabis et porco bimenstri
Cum famulis operum solutis[[1200]].
Then came calls on friends, congratulations, games, and the presentation of gifts[[1201]]. All manner of presents were made, as they are still at Christmas: among them the wax candles (cerei) deserve notice, as they are thought to have some reference, like the yule log, to the returning power of the sun’s light after the solstice. They descended from the Saturnalia into the Christmas ritual of the Latin Church[[1202]]. The sigillaria, or little paste or earthenware images which were sold all over Rome in the days before the festival[[1203]], and used as presents, also survived into Christian times; thus, in the ancient Romish Calendar, we find that all kinds of little images were on sale at the confectioners’ shops, and even in England the bakers made little images of paste at this season[[1204]]. What was the original meaning of the custom we do not know; but it reminds us of the oscilla of the Latin festival and the Compitalia[[1205]].
But the best known feature of the Saturnalia is the part played in it by the slaves, who, as we all know, were waited on by their masters, and treated as being in a position of entire equality. The earliest reference to this is in a fragment of Accius, quoted by Macrobius[[1206]]:
Iamque diem celebrant, per agros urbesque fere omnes
Exercent epulas laeti, famulosque procurant
Quisque suos: nostrique itidem, et mos traditus illine
Iste, ut cum dominis famuli epulentur ibidem.
But even this custom, as Marquardt points out, may not have been of genuine Latin origin: ‘Though the Romans looked on it as a reminiscence of the Golden Age when all men were equal, it may have begun with the lectisternium of 217 B.C., for such entertainments were a characteristic of lectisternia.’ When we turn, however, to the same author’s account[[1207]] of the Greek forms of religion introduced through the Sibylline oracles, of which the lectisternium was one, we do not find slaves included in the ritual of any of them. There was no general exclusion of outsiders or women, but nothing is said of slaves. And on the whole we may still perhaps consider the other explanation possible, that the slaves here represent the farm-servants of olden time, whatever social position they may have held, who at the end of their year’s work were allowed to enjoy themselves ‘exaequato omnium iure.’