It would thus appear that the Saturnalia were originally a feast of one day, later lengthened to five days, and again to seven days. By the time of writers like Lucian and Martial the feast continued for a week, and Lucian represents Cronos (Saturn) as a jolly old king of unreason.[59] The rich helped the poor, people made presents to each other, 'a Christmas carol philosophy,' as Dickens calls it, prevailed. The masters served the slaves at table; all was licence and riot. Wax candles were given as presents (_cerea_), like those on our Christmas trees. These _cerea_, according to Macrobius, were thought by some antiquaries to be substitutes for human sacrifices. Originally, it was said, the Pelasgi, before migrating to Italy, received an oracle from Dodona: Τῷ πατρί πέμπετε Φῶτα 'Send a man to the Father,' that is, to the god Cronos or, in Italy, Saturn. But, by a pun on the Greek _Φῶτα_, they were induced to substitute lights, the wax candles.[60] Now it is a really astonishing thing that, if actual human sacrifices were offered after our era, at the Saturnalia, no Roman antiquary (and there were plenty of antiquaries) should mention the fact, while discussing the theory that _cerea_ were commutations of sacrifice. If, now and then, under the Empire a survival or recrudescence of human sacrifice was heard of in a rural district, the antiquaries would catch at it greedily, as a proof that wax tapers really were commutations of human sacrifice, which some doubted. That rural recrudescences do occur we know from the recent case of burning an Irish peasant woman to death, to deliver her from a fairy.[61] Mr. Frazer, however, believes that survivals of human sacrifices at the Saturnalia did really occur. He is 'tempted to surmise' that the king of the revels (who answered to our 'Twelfth Night' 'King' or 'Queen of the Bean') 'may have originally personated Saturn himself.'[62] In the following page we read that the victim 'cut his own throat on the altar of the god whom he personated.' The only known or alleged instance of human sacrifice at the Saturnalia follows.