Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (38 page)

What were the Bacchanalia and the Saturnalia?

Following a miraculous conversion, the Apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus (in what is now Turkey) who had once persecuted followers of Jesus, spent years traveling the Greco-Roman world of the first century, preaching the gospel, or “good news,” of Jesus Christ. This biblical passage described his experience in Athens, where he tried to convince first-century Athenians that Jesus was the one god.

This scene was followed by another interesting episode, in which Paul caused a riot. During a trip to Ephesus, home of the temple to Artemis, known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Paul continued to preach against idols. But the silversmiths and other craftsmen, who made a good living crafting idols and statues in that Greek city, were not happy with a man preaching a religion that said, “Get rid of your false idols”. The silversmiths started a riot and captured two of Paul’s traveling companions. A reasonable town clerk stepped in and quieted the crowd, ultimately giving the tradesmen some very modern advice: If they wanted to do something about Paul and the other Christians, they should sue!

The Western world had reached another crossroads: the introduction of the Apostle Paul and the New Testament. Although the Romans crucified Jesus in Jerusalem for treason c. CE 30, his followers spread Christianity throughout the empire. Paul, a Roman citizen, would eventually go to Rome, where he was imprisoned and, legend has it, killed. Peter, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, also supposedly died in Rome during the persecution of the early Christian Church. But Rome was about be transformed. And when it was, some ancient practices would collide head-on with Christianity.

During the time of the Roman Empire (roughly from 27 BCE to 476 CE), Roman religion in the empire increasingly centered on the imperial house, and Emperor Augustus himself was deified after his death, as his uncle Julius Caesar had been deified after his assassination. Yet, as Thomas Cahill writes in
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
, “Roman religion was basically a businessman’s religion of contractual obligations…. Notonly were there few Roman myths, there was virtually no theology…the very enigmas that sparked the speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers.”

The exception to the “boring” Roman religion might have been the Bacchanalia, wild and mystic festivals celebrating the Roman (and Greek ) wine god Bacchus. Introduced into Italy around 200 BCE, the Bacchanalia were held in secret and attended first by women only. Admission to the rites was later extended to men, and the notoriety of these festivals, which from earlier Greek times had an air of drunken revelry and probably sexual liberty attached to them, came to be viewed as a threat. In Rome, the cult grew to the point that it was thought that crimes and political conspiracies were being hatched at the Bacchanalia. That led in 186 BCE to a decree of the Senate that severely restricted the festival. In spite of the harsh punishment inflicted on those found in violation of this decree, the Bacchanalia were not stamped out, particularly in the south of Italy, for a very long time.

Another popular Roman festival was the ancient celebration of Saturnalia, a thanksgiving holiday marking the winter solstice and honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Saturnalia began on December 17, and while it only lasted two days at first, it was eventually extended into a weeklong period that lost its agricultural significance and simply became a time of general merriment. Even slaves were given temporary freedom to do as they pleased, while the Romans feasted, visited one another, lit candles, and gave gifts.

All of the similarities between Saturnalia and Christmas are no accident. Christians in the fourth century assigned December 25 as Christ’s birthday because pagans already observed the day as a holiday. This would sidestep the problem of eliminating an already-popular holiday while Christianizing the population. In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ’s birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagan Romans to convert to Christianity; the new religion went down a bit easier with them when they realized that their feasts would not be taken away from them. (Another mythical connection to this special Christian date is the birth of Attis, a vegetation god from Asia Minor who was the consort of a goddess known as Cybele, another “foreign” goddess that the Romans were drawn to worship. Her temple in Rome, appropriated by Christians in the fourth century, was on the site of the Vatican.)

From the time Rome had conquered Greece, even more exotic religions were finding their way into the empire, including the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis and Mithraism, a Persian mystery religion of male initiates that flourished in the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE. Roman soldiers may have brought this cult of the Persian god Mithra back to Rome, one of a whole crowd of mystery religions competing for converts in the empire. The historian Plutarch (46–125 CE) reported that the worship of Mithra was introduced to Rome by captive pirates brought back from Cilicia. By around 100 CE, it had become widely popular among Roman bureaucrats, soldiers, and slaves. Among the legions, this was especially so, with Mithraism’s strong emphasis on honor and courage, the brotherhood of the Good combating Evil. It had several similarities to Christianity, including a holy day celebrated on December 25, and was popular enough to warrant suppression by the Christian fathers by the fourth century.

It was in this rather fertile ground of competing cults that Christianity made its debut in the Roman world. Despite persecutions, usually at times of civic tensions beginning with Nero—who was, according to many biblical authorities, the “Beast” with the infamous number 666 in the Book of Revelation—Christianity steadily gained converts. Things changed permanently with the reign of Constantine I, who was named emperor of Rome’s western provinces in 306 CE. In 312, Constantine defeated his major rival after having a vision promising victory if he fought under the sign of the Christian cross. In 313, Constantine and Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, granted Christians freedom of worship. And after Constantine defeated his coemperor in 324, he moved his capital to Byzantium in 330, renamed the city Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), and made Christianity the officially supported religion in the Roman state.

After Constantine died in 337, his three sons and two of his nephews fought for control of the Roman Empire. One of the nephews, Julian—later called the Apostate—became emperor in 361. A student of the Greek classics, Julian had been drawn to the Greek gods and underwent a “pagan conversion.” As emperor, he tried to check the spread of Christianity and restore the traditional Roman religion. In 363 CE, Julian was killed in an attempt to invade Persia. By the late 300s, Christianity was well established as the official religion of the empire, and Rome was becoming Christianity’s central city. All cults, save Christianity, were prohibited in 391 CE by an edict of Emperor Theodosius I. The empire was permanently split into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire after Emperor Theodosius I died in 395.

The Western Roman Empire grew steadily weaker. The Vandals, Visigoths, and other Germanic peoples invaded Spain, Gaul, and northern Africa. In 410, the Visigoths looted Rome, and the empire “fell” in 476, the year that the Germanic chieftain Odoacer forced Romulus Augustulus, the last ruler of the empire, from the throne. The Eastern Roman Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire until 1453, when the Turks captured Constantinople.