Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Romans Midwinter Festival.

This is our Saturnalia special.

The old Saturnalia was a hugely popular Roman holiday. The poet Catullus calls it Optimus Deerum

the best of days. And it is centered around the god Saturn, who, in spite of having a planet named after

him and a day, actually, now I think about it, is an incredibly opaque figure. That's not to say that he

wasn't important. He was really important. You can still see columns from the Temple of Saturn in the

Roman Forum. The west end of it, I think,

a temple to Saturn has stood there since the beginning of the 6th century BC, the Roman Republic's

earliest days anyway, at the bottom of the Capitoline Hill, as it would have been. So we have

records of it lasting hundreds and hundreds of years before we think of ancient Rome being a thing.

It wasn't just a temple, it was an Irarium, a treasury, so important on two counts, we might say.

And when I say that Saturn is opaque, it's because he's an ancient Roman god, but we don't have many sources from early Roman times.

At some point, the Romans become closer in contact with the Greeks,

and their gods undergo a process of twinning, like towns,

but with deities.

Syncritism is the proper word.

But Saturn gets twinned with the Greek god Kronos.

Kronos is the father of Zeus in Greek mythology.

Saturn is the father of Jupiter, the best and greatest, Optimus Maximus, in Roman mythology.

And so you can see how they kind of get mapped onto one another.

Kronos is, I mentioned him being the father of Zeus there and Saturn being the father of Jupiter.

Kronos is an absolutely terrible father.

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