Deity · Roman · c. 500 BCE
Saturn
Also called Saturnus, Kronos (Greek)
Deposed father of Jupiter. His December festival inverted the social order for a week, and his planet later became the astrological signature of melancholy and malice.
Deep source base
Saturn accumulates a reputation across two thousand years that his myth does not support. He begins as an Italian god of sowing whose December festival inverted the social order for a week — masters serving slaves, a licence with no cruelty in it. Identification with the Greek Kronos attaches the child-swallowing to him. Then astrology makes his planet the greater malefic, the slowest and coldest of the spheres, and the temperament governed by it becomes melancholy, which by the Renaissance means both depression and genius. The occasional claim that Satan is Saturn under another name is a folk etymology with nothing behind it; the two words are unrelated, and the confusion is itself part of what this corpus tracks.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
The temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, which held the state treasury — and the Saturnalia in December, when the order it stood for was inverted for a week.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Theogony & Works and Days · c. 700 BCE
- Named there as
- Kronos
- Rank
- God of the Golden Age
- Pantheon
- Roman
- Order
- Roman pantheon
- Base of operations
- The temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum, which held the state treasury — and the Saturnalia in December, when the order it stood for was inverted for a week.
- Era
- c. 500 BCE
- Traditions
- Greek, Roman
- Placed in
- The Greek Succession
Traits
- Domain
- Sowing, time, the Golden Age, dissolution of order
- Traditional form
- Veiled, bearing a sickle or pruning hook
- Metal of its planet (Agrippa, 1533)
- Lead, and gold — “Amongst Metals, Lead, and Gold, by reason of its weight, and the golden Marcasite.” (I.25)
- Planet
- Saturn
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
The temple of Saturn, which held the treasury, and the Ianus Geminus, whose doors marked war and peace.
41.892, 12.487 · Pleiades 502866838
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Saturn, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- material1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
5 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 5 texts that names Saturn, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
5 texts spanning roughly 1,120 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Kronos, Saturn, Saturnus
- Rank: given as Titan; God of the Golden Age
Castrates Ouranos, swallows his own children, and is overthrown by Zeus. Hesiod describes the Greek figure; the Roman Saturn is an identification laid over him.
Given a local history: he came to Latium as a fugitive from his son, gathered a lawless people into a community and gave them laws, and the region is named Latium because he lay hidden there. A deposed Greek Titan turned into the founding civiliser of Italy is euhemerism working for a national epic.
Ovid gives the December Saturnalia and the tradition that he ruled Latium in a golden age before Jupiter.
The deposed king whose reign is the golden age — the world before ploughing, war and property — and whose fall begins the decline through silver, bronze and iron. The corpus holds this against his Greek attestation deliberately: Kronos swallows his children, Saturn presides over the age everyone wants back, and they are the same god.
Used to make the same case from the other end — the god of the golden age turned into an argument that Rome's own antiquarians could not say what their gods were. Augustine's method throughout is to quote the Romans on themselves, which is why the polemic doubles as the corpus's best inventory of a religion that had already stopped explaining itself.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Saturn?
Is Saturn the same as El?
What rank is Saturn?
How else is Saturn spelled?
What is Saturn said to do?
How old is Saturn?
Nearest in the corpus
If Saturn is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Jupiter
King of the Gods · Roman
Sky-father and state god of Rome, identified with Zeus by the *interpretatio romana* — the ancient world's official policy of treating foreign gods as one's own under different names.
Mars
God of War and the Fields · Roman
Father of Romulus and second only to Jupiter in the state cult — an agricultural god as much as a martial one, and not simply the Greek Ares renamed.
Janus
God of Doorways · Roman
God of thresholds with no Greek equivalent — the doors of his temple stood open in war and shut in peace, and they were almost never shut.
Pluto
Lord of the Underworld · Roman
The Roman Hades, whose alternative name Orcus survives in 'ogre' — and whose realm supplied Christian writers much of their imagery for hell.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
Hades
Lord of the Underworld · Greek
Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.
The books behind Saturn
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Theogony & Works and Days
Hesiod · c. 700 BCE · Ancient Greek
Read Theogony & Works and Days in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Hesiod · Wikimedia file page
The Aeneid
Virgil; tr. John Dryden · c. 19 BCE · Latin
Read The Aeneid in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Federico Barocci · Wikimedia file page
Fasti
Ovid · c. 8 CE · Latin
Read Fasti in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Giovanni Battista Tiepolo · Wikimedia file page
The City of God
Augustine of Hippo; tr. Marcus Dods · 413–426 CE · Latin
Read The City of God in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.