Wednesday – New Year’s Day
Reader Letitia Grimes sent me a poem by Horace so seasonally appropriate that I’m turning my New Year’s post over to her. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a time of merrymaking that has inspired our New Year rituals. At the same time that we celebrate the return of the sun, we imagine the possibility of new life. Forget about last year’s dashed hopes; perhaps 2020 will be the year when we return to the Golden Age of Saturn.
The rites of Saturnalia, like Christianity’s Twelfth Night festivities, often involved an overturning of norms, as though in the chaos of such inversions a revolution (in every sense of the word) can occur. In the Horace verse that Letitia mentions, a slave is given freedom to speak truth to power, and what emerges sounds like a good set of New Year’s resolutions.
Incidentally, a similar inversion occurs in the Christmas story: a king is born in a stable, upsetting the hierarchical order and promising a new dispensation. Note that the dynamic described by Horace’s slave sounds a lot like Hegel’s master-slave relationship, where the master is enslaved no less than the slave.
I love how Letitia applies the lesson to growing income inequality, one of our most pressing issues. Dare we dream of a golden age when people live on an equal playing field?
By Letitia Grimes
Reading your recent post on the Yule-Log, I was reminded of a poem I try to read every Christmas season, Horace’s Book II, Satire VII. In it, his slave Davus is given license, according to the ancient traditions of Saturnalia, to speak freely to the master.
Saturnalia celebrated a golden age when everyone was equal. It’s fascinating that Harriet Tubman wrote about the slaves not having to work as long as the Yule-Log burned. Horace would have understood this perfectly.
Horace’s slave shames his master by pointing out his capriciousness, lack of self-control, and general corruption. Who is the slave, he asks–the one who is beaten by the rod or the one who is the slave of his impulses?
Are you my master, ruled by so many
Men and things? Touched by the rod three times, four times,
It will never release you from your miserable fears.
Add these words that carry no less weight than those
Whether one who obeys a slave’s called a proxy, as
Your lot say, or a co-slave, what else am I to you?
Wretch, you who order me around serve another,
Like a wooden puppet jerked by alien strings.
,
This reads now like the 99 percenters talking back to the 1 percent.