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Episode CIX - Saturnalia

Emperors of Rome

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Are We Talking About Saturnalia, Still Not Christmas?

The sacrifice to saturn was carried out without the priest being veiled, which was a bit odd. And basically it's how greeks sacrificed. We don't know exactly when this festival, this ritual, started. Livy claims it is as old as the temple. This is early on in his history of rome and book one, chapter 21. So fairly near the beginning of the war, when things were really going wrong, am to try and expiate disturbing prodigies. But scholars tend to think this cannot be possible, so it probably isn't quite that early. As we know, livy, before the fourth century, he doesn't have good records, so that

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