Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [127]
—The Acts of the Apostles, 17:22–28
What were the Bacchanalia and the Saturnalia?
Following a miraculous conversion, the Apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus (in what is now Turkey) who had once persecuted followers of Jesus, spent years traveling the Greco-Roman world of the first century, preaching the gospel, or “good news,” of Jesus Christ. This biblical passage described his experience in Athens, where he tried to convince first-century Athenians that Jesus was the one god.
This scene was followed by another interesting episode, in which Paul caused a riot. During a trip to Ephesus, home of the temple to Artemis, known as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Paul continued to preach against idols. But the silversmiths and other craftsmen, who made a good living crafting idols and statues in that Greek city, were not happy with a man preaching a religion that said, “Get rid of your false idols”. The silversmiths started a riot and captured two of Paul’s traveling companions. A reasonable town clerk stepped in and quieted the crowd, ultimately giving the tradesmen some very modern advice: If they wanted to do something about Paul and the other Christians, they should sue!
The Western world had reached another crossroads: the introduction of the Apostle Paul and the New Testament. Although the Romans crucified Jesus in Jerusalem for treason c. CE 30, his followers spread Christianity throughout the empire. Paul, a Roman citizen, would eventually go to Rome, where he was imprisoned and, legend has it, killed. Peter, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus, also supposedly died in Rome during the persecution of the early Christian Church. But Rome was about be transformed. And when it was, some ancient practices would collide head-on with Christianity.
During the time of the Roman Empire (roughly from 27 BCE to 476 CE), Roman religion in the empire increasingly centered on the imperial house, and Emperor Augustus himself was deified after his death, as his uncle Julius Caesar had been deified after his assassination. Yet, as Thomas Cahill writes in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, “Roman religion was basically a businessman’s religion of contractual obligations…. Notonly were there few Roman myths, there was virtually no theology…the very enigmas that sparked the speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers.”
The exception to the “boring” Roman religion might have been the Bacchanalia, wild and mystic festivals celebrating the Roman (and Greek ) wine god Bacchus. Introduced into Italy around 200 BCE, the Bacchanalia were held in secret and attended first by women only. Admission to the rites was later extended to men, and the notoriety of these festivals, which from earlier Greek times had an air of drunken revelry and probably sexual liberty attached to them, came to be viewed as a threat. In Rome, the cult grew to the point that it was thought that crimes and political conspiracies were being hatched at the Bacchanalia. That led in 186 BCE to a decree of the Senate that severely restricted the festival. In spite of the harsh punishment inflicted on those found in violation of this decree, the Bacchanalia were not stamped out, particularly in the south of Italy, for a very long time.
Another popular Roman festival was the ancient celebration of Saturnalia, a thanksgiving holiday marking the winter solstice and honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Saturnalia began on December 17, and while it only lasted