To Donatus 8

Turn your face from here to the no less regrettable contagions of another kind of spectacle: in the theatres too you will see what will give you both grief and shame. It is the tragic buskin to recount in verse the crimes of old: the ancient horror of parricides and incests is unfolded again in action shaped to the image of truth, lest what was once committed should fade away as the ages pass. Every generation is reminded by hearing that what has been done can be done. Sins never die with the old age of time, crime is never buried by the passing of the years, wickedness is never interred in oblivion. Things that have ceased to be crimes become examples. Then in the mimes it delights, by the instruction of shameful acts, either to recognize what one has done at home or to hear what one could do. Adultery is learned while it is seen; and, with the evil of public authority acting as pimp for vice, a matron who had perhaps gone to the show chaste returns from the show unchaste. Then further, how great a ruin of morals, what fuel of shameful deeds, what nourishment of vices, to be defiled by the actors' gestures, to see, against the covenant and law of birth, the endurance of incestuous shamefulness elaborately worked out! Males are unmanned; all the honour and vigour of their sex is softened by the disgrace of an enervated body; and he pleases most there who has most broken the man into a woman. He grows in praise from his crime, and is judged the more skilled the more shameful he is. He is watched, O horror, and gladly. What could such a man not persuade? He moves the senses, soothes the feelings, storms the stronger conscience of a good heart; nor is the authority of a flattering disgrace lacking, so that ruin may creep upon men by a softer hearing. They represent an unchaste Venus, an adulterous Mars, that Jupiter of theirs, chief no more in rule than in vices, burning with his very thunderbolts for earthly loves, now whitening into the plumage of a swan, now flowing down in a golden shower, now leaping forth with his ministering birds to carry off boys in their youth. Ask now whether he who watches can be sound or chaste. He imitates the gods he venerates: for the wretches even their sins become religious.