Instead of the formal and unwieldy toga, Romans of all ranks would put on a synthesis, a comfortable and colorful dinner dress that was normally reserved for private dinner parties. Strict Roman dress codes were also overturned. During the holiday week, a time of role-reversal, enslaved people could attend banquets and were celebrated with gifts and wine. “Everywhere there is clapping and singing and playing games, and everyone, slave and free man, is held as good as his neighbor,” he says. In one ancient account, the god Saturn was featured describing the festival. These “deluxe” knucklebones, pictured below, do not go together, but numerous examples have been found across the Roman Empire and are frequently depicted in painting and sculpture, suggesting the widespread popularity of the game. They were later fashioned from all sorts of materials like wood, stone, and terracotta, but from also fancier mediums like translucent glass, bronze, gold, ivory, and precious gems. As their name implies, they were originally made from the foot bones of a goat or sheep-easily accessible and cheap. Knucklebones ( tali or astragaloi in Greek) were used for games of chance-they could be rolled like dice or played like jacks. According to some accounts, you were only supposed to gamble for nuts, not money, to recreate the golden age of Saturn. Gambling, normally outlawed, was allowed in public. When the Roman poet Statius attended Emperor Domitian’s Saturnalia feast in the late first century AD, he left this five-star review: “Who can sing of the spectacle, the unrestrained mirth, the banqueting, the unbought feast, the lavish streams of wine? Ah! now I faint, and drunken with thy liquor drag myself at last to sleep.”ĭuring Saturnalia, a time of jovial merrymaking, many social norms were relaxed and inverted. Businesses and law courts were closed so everyone could take part. In Rome, the holiday was kicked off with a religious ceremony in the Temple of Saturn, followed by a free public banquet open to all. He is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and a book of poetry.Originally just one day, over the centuries the festivities grew to last a whole week, starting on December 17 and coinciding with the winter solstice. Michael André Bernstein is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In the chapter “Over the Brandy,” for example, Ivan tells his father that Smerdyakov is “a prime candidate” to initiate a revolutionary uprising. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevski explicitly states that the future revolution will be made by the Smerdyakovs. Dostoyevski, in the famous cry of The Possessed, was certain that “‘the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses’” 9 he believed that only the prior corruption of Russia’s intelligentsia, their eager surrender to the lure of conspiracy and violence, could have led so many of them to the acts of senseless catastrophe, fueled by ressentiment, false pride, and incoherent utopian fantasies, marks all of his most important post-Siberia political and cultural writings.10 9. The clearest index of the development I am tracing is the formal shift from Diderot’s dialogue proper to Dostoyevski’s first-person novel, but this mutation is itself already a consequence of a more indirect and disturbing cause. But in Notes from Underground the “gentlemen-readers” have nothing left to offer us, and the novel makes it impossible to feel anything less than the same contempt for their platitudes that the Underground Man himself flaunts. Readers of Le Neveau de Rameau are not forced by the inner logic of the text to choose between Moi and Lui, and they can find in each a welcome counterbalance to and relief from the demands of the other. In what is probably the most arresting of all the textual developments of the Saturnalian dialogues, the reader’s emotional identification with the voice of rage and thwarted rebellion is ever more thoroughly compelled by the structure and tone of succeeding works, at the same time that the dangers of that role, both for its bearer and for others, are ever more explicitly argued.
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