On the Shows 10

Let us pass on to the theatrical shows, whose origin, we have already shown, is shared with the circus, and whose titles are alike, in keeping with the name of games from the beginning and their management joined with horse-racing. Their equipment? Their equipment too is shared in this respect, that people go to the stage from temples and altars and that miserable business of incense and blood, amid flutes and trumpets, under those two most polluted masters of ceremonies at funerals and sacrifices, the undertaker and the soothsayer. So, as we passed from the origins of the games to the circus games, we shall now direct our course from there to the stage games. From the fault of its place, the theatre is properly the shrine of Venus. It was, in fact, in this way that this kind of building came into the world. For the censors often pulled down theatres just as they were rising, taking thought for morals, since they foresaw, no doubt, a great danger from their lewdness; so that here their own judgment, agreeing with us, already serves as a testimony against the heathen, and for us, as a human precedent that heightens our discipline. So Pompey the Great, a man smaller only than his theatre, when he had built that citadel of all shameful things, fearing at some time a censor's rebuke upon his memory, built a temple of Venus on top of it; and calling the people by edict to its dedication, he named it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, “under which,” he said, “we have placed tiers of seats for shows.” So he screened with the title of a temple a work condemned and deserving condemnation, and mocked discipline with superstition. But Venus and Liber get on well together. Those two demons, of drunkenness and of lust, have conspired and sworn together. So the theatre of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they properly called other stage games too Liberalia, besides those devoted to Liber, which among the Greeks are the Dionysia, and which Liber himself instituted. And plainly the stage arts too are under the patronage of Liber and Venus. What is private and peculiar to the stage, the effeminacy of gesture and of bodily movement, they offer to Venus and Liber, both dissolute gods, the one through sex, the other through excess. But what is carried out by voice and measures and instruments and letters has Apollos and Muses and Minervas and Mercuries as its owners. You will hate, Christian, the things whose authors you cannot but hate. Now we wish to add something about the arts, and about those whose authors we curse in their names. We know that the names of the dead are nothing, as are their images too; but we are not ignorant of who works under those names when images have been set up, and takes delight and counterfeits divinity: wicked spirits, that is, demons. We see, then, that the arts too are dedicated to the honor of those who dwell in the names of their authors, and are not free of idolatry, since their founders are for that very reason held to be gods. Indeed, as far as the arts are concerned, we ought to have perceived more deeply that the demons, providing for themselves from the beginning, among the other defilements of idolatry, the defilements of the shows too, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honor, also inspired the talents for such arts. For what was to come to them would not have been procured by others, nor would they then have produced it through any men but those in whose names and images and stories they had determined to carry on for themselves the business of the fraud of consecration. That the order may be completed, let us now take up the discussion of the athletic contests.