018 - A History of Rome Christmas

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. For as far back as I can remember, Christmas has been celebrated on the 25th of December. I'm sure this is true for most of you, and in fact, unless one of you out there is 1700 years old, I'd wager that this was true for all of you. Christmas, as we all know, is officially the birth date of Jesus Christ. But how was it that the 25th of December was chosen from all the dates on the calendar when there is no mention in the Bible as to the exact date of his birth? The 25th of December? Pretty random. Where did that come from?

I guess we'd be pretty far off topic if the Romans didn't have something to do with it, so I suppose it won't come as a shock when I say that the Romans had something to do with it. But we have to go back a little further than the Romans even, and work out a little astronomy first to really understand the significance of the date.

For as long as there has been civilization, there have been holidays and festivals. Days or weeks where work was put aside in honor of this or that god, and to celebrate this or that seasonal transition. The particulars change over time and place, but there are a few constants that seem to pop up over and over again, not just in Western civilization, but everywhere. For example, some sort of holiday or festival is invariably found at the beginning of spring in celebration of the return of life from its long winter dormancy. In agricultural societies, there is inevitably some sort of harvest festival, with communities feasting on the recently hauled in bounty. And of course, across time and space, back to the earliest tribes of mankind, there has been some sort of midwinter festival. And the midwinter festival, whatever the particular rituals or traditions, is always amongst the most popular and most anticipated.

Waxing somewhat philosophical on the subject, I believe the midwinter festival is omnipresent and omni-loved because it's, well, in the middle of winter. It's cold and dark and there's nothing to do. It's been cold and dark for months, and it will be cold and dark for months to come. Without some kind of pleasant break, people are liable to despair. So communities started gathering around fires and throwing week-long feasts, giving each other presents and decorating everything in sight, all in an effort to break up the dreary months.

These days, December is marked by an explosion of colored lights in windows, doorways, and rooftops. I can't help but think that this is a psychological reaction to the dull, gray, colorless winter. I always saw midwinter festivities as a prime example of humans throwing a party just because. It's the middle of winter, for crying out loud. Let's have some fun. But there was always a harsh undercurrent as well.

In early societies that lived on the razor's edge between survival and extinction, the winter was known as a time of famine. Any excess livestock had to be killed off before the truly hard months set in. The meat could be saved, but there was no point in having an excess number of mouths to feed. Accompanying this slaughter, and the copious amounts of meat it produced, were the communal feasts, sort of a last blowout before the rationing set in.

But midwinter partying for its own sake is, of course, only part of the story. Just as humans have always been finding excuses to have holidays, we have also always had a strange fixation with astronomy. I am not going to bore you with my thoughts on the root causes of that particular obsession, but let's just say that humans love staring at the sky. It did not take long for early astronomers, who, of course, doubled as early priests and shamans, to note cyclical patterns in the movements of celestial objects and begin to attach significance to a few of the more noteworthy points in those patterns.

They watched as the days grew longer and longer through the summer, until there was a period when the day reached some kind of maximum length and then began to shorten. Later, there was a moment when the day and night were exactly the same length, and then, as winter came, the night began to last longer than the day, until it reached some sort of peak length and contracted back to a day and night of equal lengths. People began to wrap up all kinds of religious and philosophical meaning in these days, what we now call the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox, the winter solstice, and the vernal equinox. They had no idea about solar systems and tilted axes and revolving spheres floating in space, but they knew something was up and wanted to get in on the action. So they started surrounding these important days with rituals, ceremonies, and, you guessed it, festivals.

So now we'll narrow our focus a bit and zoom in on the winter solstice in particular. If humans didn't need a reason to party in the middle of winter in the first place, it certainly wasn't going to bother anyone that now there was. Here the astronomer priests were, telling them that on this one particular day, the darkness that had been spreading for the last six months, bumming everyone out, had reached its maximum ebb, and now the light would be ascendant. The worst was behind them, and from here on out, every day would be a little bit lighter and a little bit warmer, rather than a little darker and a little colder. And if that isn't a reason to invent distillation, I don't know what is.

So the midwinter festivities began to occur on and around the winter solstice, just as the spring festivals began to hinge on the vernal equinox. And by the time the Romans came along then, there was already a rich tradition of festivities surrounding the winter solstice. They didn't invent anything, but they did have their own holiday calendar, which became the conduit through which these ancient celebrations passed into our own modern era.

A long-standing Roman winter tradition, dating to the early Republic, was called Saturnalia, a feast commemorating the founding of the Temple of Saturn. At first the celebration took place on December 17, but as time passed, Saturnalia grew to encompass a whole week, generally ending on December 23, but by the middle imperial period sometimes extending as far as our date of inquiry, December 25. Saturnalia was by far the most popular of Roman holidays, and came complete with large public feasts and a complete abandonment of traditional morality, always a must for the really good parties. Gambling was encouraged where, for the rest of the year, it was frowned upon, and it was encouraged not just for citizens, but for slaves as well, who were treated for the week as real, actual people.

In fact, in many cases, a sort of role-reversal game was played, where the slaves were treated as master and the master as slave. Roman citizens delighted in the novelty of serving food and running errands, while the slaves enjoyed a brief moment on the couch, humorously ordering their owners about. Those crazy Romans, what will they think of next?

As for its connection to Christmas, Saturnalia was also accompanied by gift-giving, the hanging of pine bows inside the home, and singing in the streets, which corresponds roughly to our caroling, though the Romans apparently did this while drunk and naked, which, I am thankful to say, is a tradition that died with the empire.

But for all its importance and obvious similarities to Christmas, Saturnalia was not the true reason Christmas is celebrated on December 25. That honor goes to an imported Syrian feast, called Sol Invictus, or the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. In the middle-late Imperium, the Romans began to embrace eastern sun cults, and adopted many of their corresponding rituals and holidays. And when we're talking about worshipping sun gods, the winter solstice is obviously going to be seen as a date of great importance. Sol Invictus honored the sun god for holding fast against the encroaching darkness, and celebrated the day he turned the tables on his eternal enemy night and began to retake the sky.

The Syrian-born emperor Elagabalus introduced the Romans to the feast around 220 AD, and held it every year on December 25, which, according to the Roman calendar at the time, was the date of the all-important winter solstice. Fifty years later, the emperor Aurelian, whose patron god was Sol, one of the various sun gods hanging around at the time, popularized the feast and made it an empire-wide holiday. Twenty-odd years after Aurelian, Constantine came along, and I think that we all know what happened next.

Seized with either a mystical vision of Christ, or a rather practical understanding that Christian bureaucrats were the only ones who could be trusted with the imperial treasury, Constantine officially ended the persecution of Christians, and on his deathbed converted himself and the empire to Christianity.

In the beginning of the Christian era, the leaders of the church attempted to stamp out the old pagan holidays, but ran into a great deal of resistance from the citizens of Rome, who continued to follow their old holiday calendar, holding fast to Sol Invictus in particular. The church elders, realizing they were fighting a losing battle, changed their strategy, and rather than attempting to stamp out the pagan holidays, simply co-opted them and refashioned them as Christian celebrations.

The first official connections between Christmas and December 25th began to appear around 330-350 AD. Jesus was often depicted during these years with a radiating solar crown, and was often used interchangeably with the various pagan solar deities, by a citizen body transitioning between religions. By 400, December 25th was firmly established as a celebration of the birth of Jesus, and all mention of the old gods was gone. As the empire fell, taking the last vestiges of paganism with it, Roman Catholicism stood as the last bulwark of civilization, and despite the many past claims by other deities to December 25th and the winter solstice, it was now a date for Jesus and Jesus alone. Though the importance of Christmas Day itself as a holiday has waxed and waned over the years, it was always considered the birthday of Jesus, just as it is today when, as a holiday, it now dominates the Christian holiday calendar.

So there you have it. For those of you who are celebrating Christmas, remember that when you sit down and exchange presents beneath a tree on December 25th, even though you may not be in Rome, you are doing exactly as the Romans did.

As I mentioned at the end of last week, the show will be on hiatus next week, as I am traveling for the holidays. But when I return, I hope to bring back with me a fancy new hosting server. As many of you have noted with frustration over the last few weeks, there have been many problems downloading episodes. At first, I didn't quite know what the problem was, but it dawned on me that the thousands and thousands of download requests were overwhelming my poor little free hosting account.

When I started The History of Rome, I never imagined I would need more than hobbyist-grade hosting. But the audience has now officially outgrown the venue, and I plan on spending a good chunk of my downtime getting all the bugs worked out of what I hope to be a server with more than enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone out there now and anyone who wants to hop on board in the future.

So I will see you next year, hopefully fully upgraded, so we can launch unobstructed into the Punic Wars, by far Rome's greatest test and a time of very real peril, and then begin to trace the long, slow decline of the Republic until the whirlpool begins to suck furiously downward in the middle of the first century BC. Until then, I wish you all a happy feast of the unconquered sun.