not without a Deity indeed, for Mercury was supposed to protect his thefts. He was permitted and encouraged to offer gifts to his master’s household Gods, and to pray to them for blessings on his master’s store, in which he had the same sort of interest as the ox. The festival of Saturn, the God of the primitive and conquered races from whom many of his class had sprung, brought him a season of chartered equality and license—an equality which only mocked his hopeless degradation; a license which was the seal of his bondage, since it proved that his master’s power was secure. That despotism, whether social or political, must be strong, which can afford to allow its slaves a Saturnalia.
It will be seen, then, that the Hebrew law does no small or common thing for the Slave when it makes him a member of the Congregation, and expressly enjoins that he shall take part with the freeman in the most solemn acts of national worship. “And thou shalt keep the feast of weeks unto the Lord thy God with a tribute of a freewill offering of thine hand, which thou shalt give unto the Lord thy God, according as the Lord thy God hath blessed thee: and thou shalt rejoice before the Lord thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are among you, in the place which the Lord thy God hath chosen to place His name there. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt:
men, should wear chaplets and rest (στεφανηφορεῖν κοὶ ἐλινύειν) on a certain day: but this is little more than loosing the ox from the plough.
