In his Fasti, a long-form poem covering Roman holidays from January to June, Ovid presents a unique look at Roman antiquarian lore, popular customs, and religious practice that is by turns imaginative, entertaining, high-minded, and scurrilous ; not a priestly account, despite the speaker's pose as a vates or inspired poet-prophet, but a work of description, imagination and poetic etymology that reflects the broad humor and burlesque spirit of such venerable festivals as the Saturnalia, Consualia, and feast of Anna Perenna on the Ides of March, where Ovid treats the assassination of the newly deified Julius Caesar as utterly incidental to the festivities among the Roman people.

The primitive nature of Saturnalia, combined with its mixture of sauropodomorph and theropod characteristics, has made it difficult to classify.

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn originally held December 17 and later expanded with unofficial festivities through December 23.

* Saturnalia, in honor of Saturn ( Roman festivals )

Saturn reigned in Latium during a mythical Golden Age reenacted every year at the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia is the feast at which the Romans commemorated the dedication of the temple of the god Saturn, which took place on December 17.

In ancient Rome, from the 17th to the 23rd of December, a Lord of Misrule was appointed for the feast of Saturnalia, in the guise of the good god Saturn.

In a poem about a lavish Saturnalia under Domitian, Statius makes it clear that the emperor, like Jupiter, still reigns during the temporary return of Saturn.

In 3rd-century AD sources and later, Saturn is recorded as receiving dead gladiators as offerings ( munera ) during or near the Saturnalia.

According to Porphyry, the Saturnalia occurred near the winter solstice because the sun enters Capricorn, the astrological house of Saturn, at that time.

* 17 – 23: Saturnalia in honour of Saturn, with the public ritual on the 17th

In ancient Rome, he was identified with Saturn, and the cultural exchange between Rome and Carthage as a result of the Second Punic War may have influenced the development of the Roman religious festival Saturnalia.

However, according to the anthropologist James Frazer, there was a darker side to the Saturnalia festival.

The Catholic Encyclopedia states the Church's view on the latter claim by saying that while midwinter pagan feasts such as Saturnalia may have helped influence the eventual choice to fix the date of Christmas, this does not mean that Christian Christmas traditions find their origin or inspiration there: " though the abundance of analogous midwinter festivals may indefinitely have helped the choice of the December date, the same instinct which set Natalis Invicti at the winter solstice will have sufficed, apart from deliberate adaptation or curious calculation, to set the Christian feast there too.

The Sacrilege has a clear external date and there is a strong indication that " Statuette " takes place in the same year as Saturnalia.

Its major literary sources are two almost identical passages, one in Servius ' commentary on the Aeneid ( viii. 363 ) and the other in Macrobius Saturnalia Though Servius mentions that aedes duae sunt, " there are two sacred temples ", the earliest Roman calendars mention but one festival, on 13 August, to Hercules Victor and Hercules Invictus interchangeably.

In addition, Yalda, Saturnalia, Karachun, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Yule ( see winter solstice for more ) are also celebrated around this time.

It is an ancient celebration of natures ' rebirth ( fiestas for Dionysus ( Dionysia ) and Kronos ( Saturnalia )), which ends the third day in a huge dance in the medieval square Ntoltso where all the bands are playing the same time and all the people are dancing too.

Art and literature under Augustus celebrated his reign as a new Golden Age, but the Saturnalia makes a mockery of a world in which law is determined by one man and the traditional social and political networks are reduced to the power of the emperor over his subjects.

The main sources of Janus's cult epithets are the fragments of the Carmen Saliare preserved by Varro in his work De Lingua Latina, a list preserved in a passage of Macrobius's Saturnalia ( I 9, 15-16 ), another in a passage of Johannes Lydus's De Mensibus ( IV 1 ), a list in Cedrenus's Historiarum Compendium ( I p. 295 7 Bonn ), partly dependent on Lydus's, and one in Servius Honoratus's commentary to the Aeneis ( VII 610 ).

Macrobius's list and explanation are probably based directly on Cornelius Labeo's work, as he cites him often in his Saturnalia as when he gives a list of Maia's cultural epithets and mentions one of his works, Fasti.

He states at the beginning of his Saturnalia that he was born sub alio ortos caelo (" under foreign skies "), and both of his major works are dedicated to his son, Eustachius.

The form of the Saturnalia is copied from Plato's Symposium and Gellius's Noctes atticae ; the chief authorities ( whose names, however, are not quoted ) are Gellius, Seneca the philosopher, Plutarch ( Quaestiones conviviales ), Athenaeus and the commentaries of Servius and others on Virgil.

Symmachus, and his real-life associates Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and Virius Nicomachus Flavianus are the main characters of the Saturnalia of Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, which was written in the 5th century but set in 384.

Tertullian ( early 3rd century ), writing against Christians who participated in pagan festivals ( Saturnalia and New-year ), defended the Christian festivity of Lord's Day amidst the accusation of sun-worship, acknowledging that " to Sabbaths are strange " and unobserved.

Eventually, in the middle of the Roman Saturnalia, all is cleared up, and the correct pairs of lovers are united.

A number of scholars view aspects of the Saturnalia festival as the origin of some later Christmas customs, particularly the practice of gift giving, which was suppressed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages due to perceived " pagan origins ".

Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia.

In the neighbourhood of Larissa was celebrated a festival which recalled the Roman Saturnalia, and at which the slaves were waited on by their masters.

The first non-Christian reference to the massacre is recorded four centuries later by Macrobius ( c. 395-423 ), who writes in his Saturnalia:

Saturnalia became one of the most popular Roman festivals which led to more tomfoolery, marked chiefly by having masters and slaves ostensibly switch places.

The Saturnalia was the dramatic setting of the multivolume work of that name by Macrobius, a Latin writer from late antiquity who is the major source for the holiday.

Saturnalia is the best-known of several festivals in the Greco-Roman world characterized by role reversals and behavioral license.

On the Calendar of Philocalus, the Saturnalia is represented by a man wearing a fur-trimmed coat next to a table with dice, and a caption reading " Now you have license, slave, to game with your master.

Saturnalia was supposed to have been held on December 17 from the time of the oldest Roman religious calendar, which the Romans believed to have been established by the legendary founder Romulus and his successor Numa.

Saturnalia underwent a major reform in 217 BC, after the Battle of Lake Trasimene, when the Romans suffered one of their most crushing defeats by Carthage during the Second Punic War.

Since this figure does not appear in accounts from the Republican period, the princeps of the Saturnalia may have developed as a satiric response to Rome's transition from a participatory republic to imperial monarchy under a princeps, the title assumed by the first emperor Augustus to avoid the hated connotations of the word " king " ( rex ).

* Saturnalia, A longer article by James Grout

See editions by Ludwig von Jan ( 1848 – 1852, with a bibliography of previous editions, and commentary ) and Franz Eyssenhardt ( 1893, Teubner text ); on the sources of the Saturnalia see H. Linke ( 1880 ) and Georg Wissowa ( 1880 ).

* Macrobius: The Saturnalia, the Latin text of the critical edition edited by Ludwig von Jan ( Gottfried Bass ; Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1852 ), web edition by Bill Thayer.

During the Roman Empire, the Phrygian cap ( Latin: pileus ) was worn on festive occasions such as the Saturnalia, and by emancipated slaves, whose descendants were consequently considered citizens of the Empire.

More recently, Veleda's story was fictionalized by Poul Anderson in Star of the Sea ( 1991 ) and by Lindsey Davis in The Iron Hand of Mars ( 1992 ) and Saturnalia ( 2007 ).

One of the earliest known sauropodomorphs, Saturnalia, was small and slender ( 1. 5 metres, or 5 feet long ), but by the end of the Triassic they were the largest dinosaurs of their time, and in the Jurassic / Cretaceous they kept on growing.

* Magical Love by Saturnalia c. 1974.