Origins in the Cult of Saturn

Saturnalia took its name and its centre from the god Saturn, an ancient Italian deity of sowing and agriculture whose temple stood at the foot of the Capitoline Hill on the edge of the Forum and served as the treasury of the Roman state. The festival opened at that temple with a public sacrifice performed, unusually, in the Greek rite with the head uncovered, followed by a great public banquet, the convivium publicum.

A striking detail of the cult was that the woollen bonds ordinarily tying the feet of Saturn's cult-statue were loosened for the festival, a symbolic freeing of the god that matched the loosening of ordinary rules among his worshippers. Originally a single day on 17 December, the celebration expanded in practice: the emperor Augustus is said to have fixed the official holiday at three days, while custom and later emperors stretched the merrymaking toward five or seven, making it the longest and most beloved release of the Roman winter.