Chapter 10 THE GREEK CRONIA

From Rome we turn to Greece. Cronos, in Greece, answered, more or less, to Saturn in Rome, though how much of the resemblance is due to Roman varnishing with Greek myth I need not here discuss. Now the Athenian festival of Cronos fell neither in November, December, February, nor March, but in July.[71] Therefore Mr Frazer needs to guess that the July feasts of Cronos were once, or may have been, a spring festival, like the carnival and like the Saturnalia, which (by another hypothesis) were originally in February or March, though of this we have no proof.

Indeed, it is contrary to use and wont for a populace to alter a venerable folk-festival because of an official change in the calendar. If the Romans for unknown ages had kept the Saturnalia in spring they would not move the date of their gaieties, and cut off three weeks (or twenty-nine days) of their duration, because the new year was shifted from March to January. In Scotland, all through the Middle Ages and much later, the year began in March. But Yule was not shifted into March: it remained, and remains, like the Saturnalia, at the winter solstice.

As proof that the Attic feast of Cronos (supposed to answer to the Saturnalia) was originally in spring, not in July, Mr. Frazer writes: 'A cake with twelve knobs, which perhaps referred to the twelve months of the year, was offered to Cronos by the Athenians on the fifteenth day of the month Elaphebolion, which corresponded roughly to March, and there are traces of a licence accorded to slaves at the Dionysiac festival of the opening of the wine jars,' in the month of flowers preceding.[72] It was a proper season for licence.

The possible meaning of the cake does not go for much, and Cronos is not Dionysus. There was a spring festival of Cronos at Olympia, and Aug. Mommsen thinks that the Athenian Cronos feast was originally vernal, though Athenian tradition thought it was a harvest feast.[73]

The Attic customs, then, do not suit Mr. Frazer's argument. But he has another Greek instance. Sacrificers called 'kings' offered to Cronos, at Olympia, in spring, and why should they not once have been sacrificed like Dasius, only in spring, not in November? This evidence is an inference from a presumed survival of human sacrifice to Cronos, who certainly received many such offerings.

We are not told, we do not know why the Athenian Cronia were shifted from March to July, or when, but let no arbitrary proceedings of the kind prevent them from being equated with the Saturnalia, only known to us, in fact, as a December festival, not as a vernal rejoicing. It is singularly unlucky that the July date of the Athenian Cronia does tally with the June-July date of the Persian Sac?a, as given by Mr. Frazer (and probably given correctly) in his second volume.[74] But in his third volume he awakes to the desirableness of placing the Sac?a ?about Eastertide, not in July, and so loses any benefit which his argument might have acquired from the coincidence in date of the Attic harvest feast (Cronia) and the Persian that date is originally established.[75]

How deeply this is to be regretted we shall see later, for periods of licence like the Sac?a usually occur just after harvest, the real time of the Cronia. Liberty to slaves of feasting with their masters was a feature of the harvest Cronia, as of many other harvest rejoicings.[76] But the conjecture that the Cronia originally were a vernal feast removes them from such merrymakings of harvest licence as the Sac?a in June-July. On the other hand, the conjecture that the Sac?a were vernal brings them into touch with Eastertide, and with the other conjecture that kings were once sacrificed at the conjecturally vernal Cronia, and so has its value for Mr. Frazer's argument.