Saturn

Planet Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It takes its name from Saturnus, the Roman god whom the Romans identified with the Greek Cronus, the Titan who ruled before Zeus. The planet is a gas giant with a mean radius about nine times that of Earth and the most conspicuous ring system of any planet.

The Planet

Saturn orbits the Sun at about nine and a half times Earth’s distance and takes about 29 years to go around once. It is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and it is the least dense planet in the Solar System. Its rings are made of countless pieces of ice and rock, from dust to boulders; seven main groups of rings are named with the letters D, C, B, A, F, G and E, and each of them consists of many thinner ringlets. More than 270 moons have been confirmed, and new ones are still being added. The largest, Titan, is bigger than the planet Mercury. Three pairs of moons, Mimas and Tethys, Enceladus and Dione, and Titan and Hyperion, affect each other gravitationally.

Saturn in Roman Myth

Saturnus was an old Italian god whose myth the Romans told in terms of the Greek story of Cronus. In Virgil, Saturn was the first to come to Italy: he came down from heavenly Olympus, fleeing the arms of Jupiter, an exile who had lost his kingdom. He gathered the wild, scattered people of the mountains, gave them laws, and preferred the land to be called Latium because he had hidden (latuisset) safely on its shores. Under this king, Virgil says, were the ages which people call golden, when he ruled the peoples in peaceful quiet, until a worse and duller age followed, with the madness of war and the love of possessions (Virgil, Aeneid 8.314–329). Ovid too says that when Saturn was sent into dark Tartarus the world came under Jupiter, and the silver race followed the golden (Metamorphoses 1.113–115).

Saturn and Cronus

The Greek Cronus was the youngest son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). With a sickle that Gaia gave him, he ambushed his father and cut off his genitals (Hesiod, Theogony 168–182). Cronus married his sister Rhea, who bore Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus; Cronus swallowed each child as it was born from the womb, so that no other of the heavenly gods would hold the kingly honour (Theogony 453–462). When Zeus was born, Rhea wrapped a great stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Cronus to swallow, and Zeus, grown strong, forced his father to bring up his brothers and sisters again (Theogony 485–497). In Hesiod’s Works and Days the first race of people, the golden race, lived in the time of Cronus, when he ruled in heaven: they lived like gods without sorrow, toil or wretched old age, and the earth bore fruit by itself (Works and Days 109–120).

The Saturnalia

Livy records that in the early Republic a temple was dedicated to Saturn and the festival of the Saturnalia was instituted (Livy 2.21.2). Later, in the Second Punic War, after a series of prodigies, the Romans held a sacrifice at the temple of Saturn in December, with a lectisternium (couches prepared by the senators) and a public banquet; for a day and a night the cry “Saturnalia!” resounded through the city, and the people were told to treat that day as a festival for ever (Livy 22.1.19–20). The temple of Saturn in the Forum also housed the public treasury (Livy 39.4.8).

The Planet in Antiquity

The Greeks called the planets “wanderers”, and the Romans gave them the names of gods. Hyginus lists five and puts the star of Saturn last and highest, moving in the largest circle; it passes through the twelve signs of the zodiac in thirty years (Hyginus, Astronomica 4). That agrees closely with the modern figure for Saturn’s orbit, which is about 29 and a half years.