on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined.  The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged; “some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension of customary restraints and conventions.  The Mediaeval Feast of Fools—­a New Year’s Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in France—­presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject of fantastic parody.  The Church, according to Nietzsche’s saying, like all wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age, as Meray remarks, “the temple offered the complete notes of the human gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys.  The sacred festivals of mediaeval Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Meray admits, all great and vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary sometimes to play with their sacred things.

Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life.  As Nietzsche truly remarks (in his Geburt der Tragoedie) the Greeks recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy, and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy might harmlessly flow.  Plutarch, the last and most influential of the Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay “On the Training of Children"), that “even in bows and harps we loosen their strings that we may bend and wind them up again.”  Seneca, perhaps the most influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended occasional drunkenness.  “Sometimes,” he wrote in his De Tranquillilate, “we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine.  For it washes away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths.  The inventor of wine is called Liber because he frees the soul from the servitude of care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all undertakings.”  The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone, and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more abandonment than those of Greece.  When these festivals began to lose their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had begun.