Nonetheless, most people continued celebrating after the holiday officially ended, leading later emperors to restore some of the days of celebration that Augustus had removed. The emperor Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) tried to shorten Saturnalia to only three days of celebration, lasting from December 17th to December 19th. In truth, Saturnalia was originally a one-day festival that took place on December 17th, but the holiday was so popular and beloved that, by the first century BCE, it had been extended into a seven-day long festival, which began on December 17th and continued until December 23rd.
This claim has been repeated a million times on the internet, but it is simply not true. One very popular misconception about Saturnalia is that it was celebrated on December 25th.
This year, however, I’ve decided to write about it again, focusing on what we know about how the holiday was actually celebrated. I’ve written about Saturnalia before-usually in the context of debunking popular misconceptions about it being the source of modern American Christmas traditions. They believed that the reign of Saturnus had been a “Golden Age,” in which all human beings had lived together in harmony and simplicity, and that Saturnalia was a temporary restoration of Saturnus’s reign on earth that could only last until the end of the festival. The Romans believed that, in very ancient times, before Iupiter became the king of the deities, the cosmos had been ruled by Iupiter’s father Saturnus. Saturnalia is an ancient Roman holiday in honor of the god Saturnus that began on December 17th.
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