Quick Answer
Seven books of dinner conversation among Rome's last great pagan aristocrats, staged fifty years after the fact by a man who was not there. It contains the fullest surviving statement of late antique solar theology, an entire book of ancient jokes, and quotations that are the only surviving trace of a good deal of early Latin poetry. It is also, like everything else Macrobius wrote, largely assembled from other people's books.
Key Takeaways
- All the gods are the Sun. Praetextatus's speech in book one is the key document of fourth-century pagan syncretism.
- Book two is jokes, and almost no other collection of ancient humour survives intact.
- It saved early Latin poetry. Ennius, Lucilius and Accius survive partly because Macrobius quoted them at Virgil.
- The setting is fiction. The date does not work and Macrobius was writing about a world already gone.
- The pagan-resistance reading has collapsed. Modern scholarship reads it as nostalgia, not manifesto.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
The Saturnalia is a dialogue in seven books, written by Macrobius in the fifth century, and set during the December festival that gave it its name.
The form is the literary symposium, a genre running back through Plutarch and Athenaeus to Plato: educated men at dinner, discussing whatever comes up, with the conversation ranging across subjects while the wine circulates. It was a well-established way of packaging miscellaneous learning into something readable.
Macrobius is the same man who wrote the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, and the two works are his entire surviving output. Very little is known about him beyond that he was almost certainly a senior imperial official.
The Saturnalia is the longer, stranger and less read of the two, and it is far more useful to historians.
On the festival: the Saturnalia ran for several days in mid-December and was the great inversion festival of the Roman year. Business stopped, formal dress was set aside, gambling was permitted, gifts were exchanged, and slaves were served by their masters or allowed licence. The setting is not incidental; the freedom of the occasion is what licenses the range of the conversation.
The Guest List
Macrobius populates his dinner with real people, and the choice tells you what the book is for.
Vettius Agorius Praetextatus was one of the most distinguished Romans of his generation, holder of high office and of a remarkable number of priesthoods across several cults, and the most eminent representative of traditional Roman religion in the later fourth century. He gives the great speech in book one.
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus was the finest orator of the age, remembered above all for his appeal to have the Altar of Victory restored to the Senate house, a request refused after Ambrose of Milan argued against it. He is the model of urbane senatorial civility.
Virius Nicomachus Flavianus was a scholar and official from the same circle, whose career ended badly in the political and religious conflicts of the period.
Servius, the grammarian, is present as the young expert. His commentary on Virgil is one of the most important works of ancient scholarship and survives.
Around them are physicians, rhetoricians, a philosopher, and Evangelus, who exists to be rude, to challenge the reverence for Virgil, and to give the others something to push against.
A Dinner That Never Happened
The dramatic date is around 383, and the conversation moves over three days between the houses of Praetextatus, Flavianus and Symmachus.
It is a fiction, and not a subtle one. Macrobius was writing roughly fifty years later. The chronology does not work; participants who are present would have been too young, or elsewhere, or in one case very close to death. Praetextatus died in 384.
Ancient readers would not have regarded this as dishonest. The symposium was a form, and setting a conversation in a plausible past among distinguished figures was what the form did. Plato's dialogues are not transcripts either.
What the fiction achieves is worth noticing. Macrobius is reconstructing a world he did not live in, populated by men whose names carried enormous weight, at the last moment when that world could be imagined intact. Whatever his intentions, the book is an act of retrospection, and the tone of loss in it is not accidental.
The Calendar and the Festival
The first book opens with antiquarian questions and they are more interesting than they sound.
Why is the festival called the Saturnalia. What did Saturn have to do with Italy. Why does the Roman year have the shape it has, and why do the months carry the names they do. How did the calendar reach its present form, and what did Julius Caesar change.
This material matters because Roman religion was in large part a calendar. Which days were auspicious, which festivals fell when, which rites belonged to which date: that was the substance of the traditional cult, and a great deal of what we know about it survives in antiquarian discussions like this one, drawing on Varro and other lost scholars.
For anyone interested in the actual practice of Roman religion rather than the mythology, these opening chapters are among the best sources available.
All the Gods Are the Sun
Then Praetextatus delivers the speech that makes this book important for the history of religion.
His argument is that the gods of the traditional pantheons are not separate beings but aspects, names and functions of a single power, and that power is the Sun.
He works through them methodically. Apollo is obviously solar. Liber, the Roman Dionysus, is the Sun in another aspect. Mars is the Sun's heat and force. Mercury is the Sun's motion and speech. Aesculapius is the Sun's health-giving power. Serapis and the Egyptian gods are solar. Even deities that look nocturnal or chthonic are brought in through etymology and cultic argument.
The method is loose by any standard: etymologies that do not hold, epithets pressed hard, and cultic details assembled to support a conclusion arrived at in advance. As philology it is worthless.
As evidence it is invaluable, because it shows what educated pagans in the fourth century were actually doing with their inherited religion. Faced with a Christianity insisting on one God, and with centuries of philosophical monotheism in the Platonic tradition, the traditional cults were being reinterpreted as a single worship under many names.
This is the crucial thing about late antique paganism that surprises people. It was not a naive polytheism defending itself against a sophisticated monotheism. Educated pagans had been resolving their gods into a single divine principle for a long time, through Neoplatonic philosophy and through solar theology of exactly this kind. The argument of the fourth century was not one god against many. It was about which one, and about what the many were.
The Book of Jokes
The second book is the surprise, and it is worth the price of admission.
It collects witticisms, retorts, insults and anecdotes, organised loosely by type and by the person who delivered them. There is a substantial run concerning the emperor Augustus, both jokes he made and jokes made at his expense, and material about his daughter Julia that is unusually frank.
Some of it is genuinely funny. Some of it depends on context we no longer have. A fair amount is the ancient equivalent of a well-timed put-down at a dinner party, preserved because someone thought it too good to lose.
Its value is that almost nothing else like it survives. Ancient literature preserves epic, tragedy, history, oratory and philosophy in quantity. It preserves very little of what people actually said to each other for amusement, because nobody wrote that down. A whole book of it, transmitted intact, is a rarity, and it does more to make fourth-century Romans seem like people than any amount of the rest.
Four Books on One Poet
Books three to six are all about Virgil, and the proportion tells you something about late antiquity.
Book three treats him as an authority on religion: the correct forms of prayer, the categories of sacrifice, the technical vocabulary of ritual and augury. The assumption is that Virgil got these details right because he knew the priestly literature, and the book mines the Aeneid as a source on Roman religious practice.
Book four analyses his handling of emotion, working through the rhetorical devices by which particular passages produce their effect.
Book five compares him with Homer at length, passage against passage, assessing where he imitates, where he improves and where he falls short.
Book six catalogues his borrowings from earlier Latin poets, quoting the originals alongside his versions.
Two things follow. This is where the conception of Virgil as a repository of all knowledge, religious, scientific, rhetorical and philosophical, gets its fullest statement, and that conception passed into the Middle Ages and produced everything from the school curriculum to Virgil's role as a guide in Dante.
And the sixth book, by quoting so extensively in order to demonstrate the borrowing, accidentally became one of the most important sources for the poetry it was quoting.
What It Saved
This deserves emphasis because it is the book's largest contribution and it is a by-product.
Early Latin literature is almost entirely lost. Ennius, who wrote the epic that Virgil superseded, survives in fragments. So do Lucilius the satirist, Accius and Pacuvius the tragedians, Naevius, and a long list of others. What we have of them are quotations in later authors.
Macrobius quotes them at length, because his argument required setting Virgil's lines beside their models. For several of these poets, the Saturnalia is among the principal sources of the text we have.
The same holds for prose. Varro, the greatest Roman antiquarian, is mostly lost, and a good deal of what we know of Roman religious scholarship comes through compilers like this one.
It is the same pattern as the Commentary preserving Cicero: a second-rate work outlives the first-rate works it quotes, and becomes the reason they exist at all.
The Last Book
The seventh book turns to physical and medical questions of the kind that suited after-dinner conversation.
Why does wine affect people differently. What happens in digestion. Why do some foods sit heavily. How does vision work. Why do women feel cold differently from men. Whether it is better to drink hot or cold.
The science is ancient and mostly wrong, and the interest is in the genre. This is what educated Romans did with a full stomach and a live audience: pose a problem, invite competing explanations, and adjudicate.
The book breaks off unfinished. Whether more was written and lost, or whether the work was left incomplete, cannot be determined.
Where He Got It
The uncomfortable fact about the Saturnalia is that Macrobius did not write most of it.
Source criticism has traced large sections to earlier authors. Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights, a second-century miscellany, supplies a great deal, sometimes with wording close to identical. Plutarch's Table Talk lies behind much of the symposium material. Seneca, Didymus and others contribute.
He does not credit them. In fairness, the conventions of the period around acknowledgement were not ours, and the compilation of received learning into a usable form was a recognised and valued activity rather than a deception.
It does mean two things for a reader. First, the Saturnalia is a container for older material and its value is largely as a container. Second, where Gellius or Plutarch survive independently, you can read the source rather than the copy, and generally should.
The Manifesto That Was Not
For a long time this book was read as something much more dramatic than it is, and the revision of that reading is the most interesting thing in modern Macrobius scholarship.
The older interpretation went roughly as follows. In the later fourth century, as Christianity became dominant and the traditional cults were progressively restricted, a circle of Roman aristocrats mounted a cultural resistance: a pagan revival, expressed through the patronage of classical literature, the defence of the old rites, and works like this one. On that reading the Saturnalia is a manifesto, celebrating the heroes of that resistance and encoding its values.
Alan Cameron's The Last Pagans of Rome, published in 2011, dismantled a great deal of this. The argument, made across a long and detailed book, is that there was no organised pagan literary revival, that the supposed circle was not a movement, that the interest in classical literature was shared by Christians and pagans alike as a matter of shared education rather than religious allegiance, and that reading these works as partisan documents projects a conflict onto material that does not contain it.
On the revised view, Macrobius is writing about a generation his readers admired, in a genre everyone valued, about a set of subjects that had ceased to be religiously contentious in the way the older reading assumed. He is an antiquarian with a taste for a vanished style of learning.
The debate has not entirely closed and Cameron's book has been argued with. It has shifted the default, and anyone reading older scholarship on the Saturnalia should know that its framing has been seriously challenged.
Was He a Pagan
The related question about the author himself has no answer.
Macrobius never mentions Christianity, in either surviving work, in any capacity. He does not attack it, defend against it, accommodate it or acknowledge that it exists. Writing in the fifth century, in an empire that had been Christian for generations, in a governing class that was substantially Christian, this silence is remarkable.
Three readings are possible. He was a pagan, writing in a register that ignored what he could not change. He was a Christian, writing within a classical literary tradition where religious profession was simply not the register of the genre. Or he had no strong commitment and found the question uninteresting.
The silence is what made him usable to medieval Christian readers, who copied both his works enthusiastically for a thousand years without ever needing to argue with him.
Which Edition to Read
Robert Kaster's Loeb edition, published in three volumes in 2011, is the current standard. It gives the Latin with a facing English translation and substantial notes, and Kaster also produced the critical Latin text and a companion volume of textual studies. The linked edition below is the first volume of that set, covering books one and two.
Percival Vaughan Davies produced the older complete English translation for Columbia University Press, and it remains serviceable if you want the whole thing in one volume without the Latin.
Read book one and book two first. The calendar material and the solar theology are the historically important part, and the jokes are the enjoyable part, and between them they give you the character of the whole.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know what late Roman religion actually looked like from inside. Not the mythology, which is available everywhere, but the practice: the calendar, the priesthoods, the ritual vocabulary, and the intellectual moves educated people were making with their inherited gods.
Read book one if you are interested in solar theology and the pull toward a single divine principle in the ancient world. It connects directly to the mystery traditions, to the Egyptian material that Rome had absorbed, and to the philosophical monotheism running through Porphyry and the Platonic schools.
Read book two if you want to hear ancient people being funny, which is a rarer experience than it should be.
Read it alongside the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, since together they are one man's whole surviving output and they show two quite different sides of late antique learning.
Do not read it for argument, because there is none. Do not read it as a record of a real occasion. And do not read older accounts of it as a pagan last stand without also reading the case against that interpretation.
Something in this book is worth carrying and it is not in the content. Macrobius assembled a dinner party of men who were already dead, in a world that had already ended, and had them talk about a calendar nobody was keeping any more. He did it about fifty years too late, using other people's material, and the result preserved the poetry of six centuries and the religious practice of a civilisation. He was not trying to save any of it; he was writing an entertaining book about people he admired. A great deal of what survives from any past survives like this, sideways, in the luggage of somebody who was interested in something else.
Three days, three houses, and a conversation that never took place.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. The linked volume is the first of Kaster's three-volume Loeb, covering books one and two, which is where the calendar material, the solar theology and the jokes are.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Saturnalia?
A long dialogue in seven books by Macrobius, written in the fifth century, set during the December festival of the Saturnalia at the houses of three Roman aristocrats. The guests discuss the calendar, religion, jokes, Virgil, and questions of natural science over three days of dinner conversation.
Who are the characters?
Real figures from the Roman elite of the later fourth century, including Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, a leading pagan priest and official, the orator Symmachus, Nicomachus Flavianus, and the grammarian Servius who wrote the great commentary on Virgil. They are historical people used as speakers.
Is the setting real?
No. The dramatic date is around 383, and Macrobius was writing roughly fifty years later. Some of the participants could not plausibly have been in the room together at that date. It is a literary reconstruction of a lost world, not a record of an evening.
What is the solar theology in book one?
A long speech in which Praetextatus argues that the many gods of the traditional religions are all aspects of one power, the Sun. Apollo, Liber, Mars, Mercury, Aesculapius, Serapis and others are resolved into solar functions. It is the fullest surviving statement of late antique pagan syncretism.
Is there really a book of jokes?
Yes. The second book collects witticisms, retorts and anecdotes, including a run of material about the emperor Augustus and his daughter Julia. Ancient humour is very poorly preserved, so an entire book of it surviving intact is a genuine rarity.
Why so much about Virgil?
Four of the seven books treat Virgil as a universal authority: on religious law and ritual, on rhetoric and emotion, in comparison with Homer, and in his debts to earlier Latin poets. This treatment of one poet as a repository of all knowledge shaped how the Middle Ages read him.
What does it preserve that is otherwise lost?
A great deal of early Latin poetry and prose, quoted for comparison with Virgil. Fragments of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius, Naevius and others survive substantially because Macrobius quoted them. For the study of pre-classical Latin literature he is a primary source.
Did Macrobius write it himself?
He compiled it. Large sections are taken, sometimes close to verbatim, from earlier authors including Aulus Gellius, Plutarch and Seneca, without acknowledgement. Source criticism has traced much of the material, and by modern standards the borrowing is extensive.
Is it a pagan manifesto?
It was long read that way, as a defence of traditional religion by a circle resisting Christianity. That interpretation has been substantially revised, most influentially by Alan Cameron, who argued there was no organised pagan literary revival and that Macrobius is a nostalgic antiquarian rather than a partisan.
Was Macrobius a pagan?
Unknown. He never mentions Christianity in either of his surviving works, which by the fifth century is itself striking. He may have been a pagan, a Christian writing in an inherited literary idiom, or simply uninterested. The question has been argued for a long time without resolution.
Is the last book complete?
No. The seventh book, covering scientific and medical table talk, breaks off, and the work as we have it is missing its ending. Whether more was written and lost, or whether it was never finished, cannot be determined.
Which edition should I read?
Robert Kaster's three-volume Loeb edition, published in 2011, gives the Latin and English facing with full notes and is the current standard. Percival Vaughan Davies produced the older complete English translation for Columbia University Press.
Read book one against book two
Do this in a single evening. Read Praetextatus resolving every god in the Mediterranean into the Sun, in the most elevated register the Latin language had. Then read the next book, which is people telling jokes about the emperor's daughter. Same dinner, same men, same author, forty pages apart. Every account of the ancient world that gives you only one of those registers is giving you half a civilisation, and the half it usually drops is the one where they were laughing.
Sources & References
- Macrobius. Saturnalia, ed. and trans. Robert A. Kaster, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols., 2011.
- Davies, P. V., trans. The Saturnalia. Columbia University Press.
- Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, his other surviving work.
- Cameron, A. (2011). The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford University Press.
- Aulus Gellius. Attic Nights, a principal source for the compiled material.
- Plutarch. Table Talk, the model and partial source for the symposium form.
- Servius, commentary on Virgil, by the grammarian who appears as a character.