Know then, ye who are ignorant of this, and ye who feign ignorance be
reminded, while you murmur against Him who has freed you from such
rulers, that the scenic games, exhibitions of shameless folly and
licence, were established at Rome, not by men's vicious cravings,
but by the appointment of your gods. Much more pardonably might
you have rendered divine honours to Scipio than to such gods as
these. The gods were not so moral as their pontiff. But give me now
your attention, if your mind, inebriated by its deep potations of
error, can take in any sober truth. The gods enjoined that games
be exhibited in their honour to stay a physical pestilence; their
pontiff prohibited the theatre from being constructed, to prevent a
moral pestilence. If, then, there remains in you sufficient mental
enlightenment to prefer the soul to the body, choose whom you will
worship. Besides, though the pestilence was stayed, this was not
because the voluptuous madness of stage-plays had taken possession of
a warlike people hitherto accustomed only to the games of the circus;
but these astute and wicked spirits, foreseeing that in due course
the pestilence would shortly cease, took occasion to infect, not the
bodies, but the morals of their worshippers, with a far more serious
disease. And in this pestilence these gods find great enjoyment,
because it benighted the minds of men with so gross a darkness, and
dishonoured them with so foul a deformity, that even quite recently
(will posterity be able to credit it?) some of those who fled from
the sack of Rome and found refuge in Carthage, were so infected with
this disease, that day after day they seemed to contend with one
another who should most madly run after the actors in the theatres.