Chapter CVII: Section VIII: Saturn, &c

Saturnus was a mythical king of ancient Italy, peaceful, and given to agriculture, indeed, his name is thought to come from _satus_ (sown). It is very odd that he should have become the owner of all the fame of the Greek Kronos, infanticide, planet rings, and all; but so completely has he seized upon them that we never think of him as the god of seed-time, but only as the discarded king of heaven and father of Jupiter.

We should have little to do with him were it not that the later Romans formed from him the name of Saturninus, which belonged to sundry early saints, and furnished the old Welsh Sadwrn.

Sylvanus was a deity called from _sylva_ (a wood), the protector of husbandmen and their crops, in the shape of an old man with a cypress-tree in his hand. His had become a Roman name just before the Christian era, and belonged to the companion of St. Paul, who is called Sylvanus in the Epistles, and, by the contraction, Silas in the Acts. This contracted form, Silas, has been revived in England as a Scripture name.

St. Sylvanus, or Silverius, was a pope whom his Church esteems a martyr, as he died in the hands of Belisarius; but sylvan, or salvage, was chiefly used in the middle ages to express a dweller in a forest, rude and hardly human. Silvano, Selvaggio, or Silvestro, was generally the name of monsters with shaggy locks, clubs, and girdles of ivy leaves, who appeared in romance; and Guidon Selvaggio was the rustic knight of Boiardo and Ariosto. Occasionally these words became names, and about the year 1200, Sylvestro Gozzolini, of Osimo, founded an order of monks, who, probably, are the cause that Sylvester became known in Ireland as a Christian name, and has come to us as a surname, while the French have it as Sylvestre.

The son of Æneas and Lavinia was said to have been born in a wood, and therefore called Æneas Silvius, and his name was given to one of the Piccolomini family, Enea Silvio, afterwards pope; and also belonged to an historian. Sylvain, Sylvan, Sylvius, Sylvia became favourite names for shepherds and shepherdesses in the time of the pastoral romance; Sylvia turned into a poetical name for a country maid, and has since been used as a village Christian name, having been perhaps first chosen by some fanciful Lady Bountiful.