king of Saturnalia (and used the occasion to humiliate his step-brother by forcing him to sing in front of a drunken crowd). According to Lucian, writing in the second century, Saturnalia was a time of: Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.4 This loss of rules and hierarchy supposedly recalled the ‘golden age’ of Saturn, when no one was a slave, no one held property, and ‘all things were common to all’,5 a brief restoration of
