The Festival of the Slaves

For one week each December, Rome turned its social order over to the people it owned. The Saturnalia ran from the seventeenth of December to the twenty-third in Cicero's time, and during it the rules of the most stratified society in the ancient world were suspended in public. Slaves did no work. They gambled openly, wore the pileus, the felt cap of the freed man, dressed in their masters' dinner clothes and were waited on at table by the household that owned them. A Lord of Misrule presided over each house and issued comic commands that had to be obeyed; the young Nero once held the role and used it to humiliate his stepbrother Britannicus before the court. In Lucian's dialogue the god himself announces the terms: during his week the serious is barred, no business allowed, only drinking, noise, games, dice, the appointment of kings and the feasting of slaves. The festival was not a concession wrung from a nervous elite. It was state religion, calendared and publicly funded, and it commemorated a golden age under Saturn when all men had been equal.

Everyone understood the equality to be temporary, which was the point. Petronius records the standard rebuke to a slave who laughed too freely out of season: was it December yet? The licence was real for exactly as long as the calendar allowed and no longer, and the calendar belonged to the same order the festival inverted. Rome ran this arrangement for centuries. The Saturnalia outlasted the Republic, outlasted the Julio-Claudians, and was still being marked in ecclesiastical calendars in the fifth century under the plain name feriae servorum, the festival of the slaves. An empire with a genius for administration had concluded, correctly, that a scheduled week of mockery cost it nothing and bought it goodwill, and that the safest possible venue for contempt of the social order was a festival the social order owned.

Twentieth-century theory gave this arrangement two competing readings. Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on Rabelais, saw in carnival the people's second life: a genuine, if temporary, liberation from hierarchy, in which the world turned upside down revealed the arbitrariness of rank. Umberto Eco, in a 1984 essay that deserves wider circulation among television executives, gave the colder account. Carnival, he argued, can exist only as an authorized transgression. It presupposes the rule it breaks; the parody works only because the parodied order remains intact, respected and overwhelmingly present at the moment of its violation. A rebellion the authorities have licensed, budgeted and scheduled is no rehearsal for revolution but an affirmation of the law, performed with laughter. Eco added the sentence that now reads like a commissioning memo: if the ancient religious carnival was limited in time, the modern mass carnival is limited in space, reserved for certain places, certain streets, or framed by the television screen.

The frame he named now carries a single dominant genre. Since 2019 the central subject of prestige screen entertainment has been the moral squalor of the rich. Parasite took two hundred and fifty-four million dollars at the global box office and became the first film not in English to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Triangle of Sadness, which shipwrecks the passengers and crew of a superyacht along with their hierarchies, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2022, the same year The Menu fed its billionaire diners their own pretensions. Succession ended its run as the defining drama of its era, its finale drawing 2.9 million viewers, a series high. The White Lotus, a murder mystery in which wealth is both weapon and motive, drew 6.2 million for its third-season finale in April 2025. Billions, Industry, Glass Onion and Saltburn mined the same seam. Contempt for the rich is the most reliable product in the entertainment business, and it is sold, at premium subscription prices, to an audience affluent enough to recognize the furniture.

Mark Fisher, the English critic who gave our moment its most useful phrase, had described the mechanism a decade before the genre peaked. In Capitalist Realism he observed that anti-capitalism is widely disseminated within capitalism, that the villain of the Hollywood film is reliably the evil corporation, and that this gestural anti-capitalism reinforces the system it pretends to oppose. His example was Pixar's WALL-E, a film that indicts consumer capitalism while its studio merchandises the indictment. The film, Fisher wrote, performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. He borrowed the term interpassivity for the arrangement: the artifact has the ethical experience on your behalf. Applied to prestige television, the point sharpens. The viewer's contempt for the billionaire class is performed nightly, in high production values, by that class's own studios, and billed monthly. The subscription is the indulgence.

The joke has a policy annex. In June 2024 the Brazilian presidency of the G20 published a report it had commissioned from the economist Gabriel Zucman: a blueprint for a coordinated minimum tax of two percent on the wealth of the world's billionaires, technically feasible, its revenues estimated. The mockery and the measure now advance in the same news cycle, and it would be flattering to read the first as the herald of the second. Roman evidence suggests otherwise. The Saturnalia did not precede manumission; it made slavery survivable to live inside and agreeable to govern. A society that can dramatize its own inequities beautifully, at scale, for profit, has discovered something about those inequities that should worry anyone hoping the drama matters: it has priced them. Outrage that renews each season is catalogued as revenue.

Petronius's barb is the whole argument compressed. Is it December yet? The question assumed the festival had a season. Ours does not; it has a release calendar, and it renews. Eco closed his essay by observing that the entertainment business very seldom displays real humour, which threatens frames; it sells carnival, which confirms them. Rome would have recognized the trade. The empire that schedules your laughter at it has made a judgment about your aim, and four centuries of Saturnalia suggest the judgment is sound. The crown the Lord of Misrule wore was paper, and everyone at the feast was meant to notice.

Sources:

• Encyclopaedia Romana, "Saturnalia", University of Chicago (Penelope), drawing on Macrobius, Seneca, Martial, Tacitus, Petronius and Lucian. (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/saturnalia.html)

• Umberto Eco, "The Frames of Comic 'Freedom'", in Carnival! (Mouton, 1984), for carnival as authorized transgression and the modern mass carnival framed by the television screen. (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110848717.1)

• Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (MIT Press, 1968), for the carnival as the people's second life. (https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12184.001.0001)

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), for gestural anti-capitalism, WALL-E and interpassivity. (https://archive.org/stream/capitalist-realism-is-there-no-alternative/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20there%20no%20alternativ%20-%20Mark%20Fisher_djvu.txt)

• Warner Bros. Discovery press release, "Succession Finale Draws Series High 2.9 Million Viewers" (May 30, 2023). (https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/hbo-0/succession/succession-finale-draws-series-high-29-million-viewers)

• Warner Bros. Discovery press release, "The White Lotus Finale Episode Draws 6.2 Million U.S. Sunday Night Viewers" (April 7, 2025). (https://press.wbd.com/us/media-release/hbo-0/white-lotus/white-lotus-finale-episode-draws-62-million-us-sunday-night-viewers-breaking)

• The Numbers, Parasite (2019) box office: $253,678,159 worldwide. (https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Parasite-%282019-South-Korea%29)

• Festival de Cannes press release, winners of the 75th Festival (Triangle of Sadness, Palme d'Or, 2022). (https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/press/press-releases/the-75th-festival-de-cannes-winners-list/)

• The New York Times, "'Parasite' Earns Best-Picture Oscar, First for a Movie Not in English" (February 9, 2020). (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/movies/parasite-movie-oscars-best-picture.html)

• Gabriel Zucman, "A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals", report commissioned by the Brazilian G20 Presidency (June 25, 2024). (https://taxobservatory.world/www-site/uploads/2024/06/Zucman-Report-Executive-Summary-EN.pdf)