Rome kept its treasury in the temple of a god whose statue wore woollen fetters
For most of the year, the cult statue of Saturn in Rome had its feet bound with wool. Only during his December festival, the Saturnalia, were the bindings removed, and the city briefly turned its rules upside down. The same temple doubled as the state treasury, an odd home for public money.
Saturn was an old Roman god with a crowded job description: time, generation, dissolution, abundance, wealth, agriculture, renewal and liberation. Romans remembered a remote era when he and Janus ruled the site of the city before it was founded, and the Capitol was once called the Saturnian hill. His reign was pictured as a Golden Age, when the earth fed people freely and nobody had to labour. After Rome conquered Greece he merged with the Titan Cronus, inheriting his family tree, so that by the 3rd century BC Jupiter was already being called Saturn's son.
His temple at the foot of the Capitoline Hill was consecrated in 497 BC and was the oldest temple in the pontiffs' records; a row of columns from its final rebuilding still stands. It held the aerarium, the treasury and archives, throughout Roman history. The Saturnalia each December brought feasting, gift-giving, free speech and role reversals, and in 217 BCE Greek customs from the Kronia were blended into it, which is why scholars struggle to separate the Roman god from Greek borrowings.
His name has puzzled people since antiquity. Varro tied it to satus, sowing, though modern linguists note the long vowel does not fit; an Etruscan god called Satre may be a better match. Another title, Sterculius, came from the word for manure, a nod to life returning from decay. His December slot also bound him to the turning of the year, and the scythe and aged face of Father Time descend from his farming tool and his image as the old year giving way.
Even his rites were inverted. Romans normally sacrificed with heads covered, but Saturn's offerings followed the Greek rite with heads bare, because the god himself was shown veiled, as a Pompeii painting of him with a sickle and white veil shows. Plutarch explained the veil by calling him the father of truth. The planet and Saturday still bear his name.
Source: Saturn (mythology)
