But of this we shall have more to say, if the Lord God of truth permit, in its own place.(3) However, if the philosophers have made any discoveries which are sufficient to guide men to virtue and blessedness, would it not have been greater justice to vote divine honors to them? Were it not more accordant with every virtuous sentiment to read Plato's writings in a "Temple of Plato,"than to be present in the temples of devils to witness the priests of Cybele(4) mutilating themselves, the effeminate being consecrated, the raving fanatics cutting themselves, and whatever other cruel or shameful, or shamefully cruel or cruelly shameful, ceremony is enjoined by the ritual of such gods as these? Were it not a more suitable education, and more likely to prompt the youth to virtue, if they heard public recitals of the laws of the gods, instead of the vain laudation of the customs and laws of their ancestors? Certainly all the worshippers of the Roman gods, when once they are possessed by what Persius calls "the burning poison of lust,"(1) prefer to witness the deeds of Jupiter rather than to hear what Plato taught or Cato censured.
Hence the young profligate in Terence, when he sees on the wall a fresco representing the fabled descent of Jupiter into the lap of Danaª in the form of a golden shower, accepts this as authoritative precedent for his own licentiousness, and boasts that he is an imitator of God."And what God?" he says."He who with His thunder shakes the loftiest temples.And was I, a poor creature compared to Him, to make bones of it? No; I did it, and with all my CHAP.8.--THAT THE THEATRICAL EXHIBITIONS PUBLISHING THE SHAMEFUL ACTIONSOF THE
GODS, PROPITIATED RATHER THAN OFFENDED THEM.
But, some one will interpose, these are the fables of poets, not the deliverances of the gods themselves.Well, I have no mind to arbitrate between the lewdness of theatrical entertainments and of mystic rites; only this I say, and history bears me out in making the assertion, that those same entertainments, in which the fictions of poets are the main attraction, were not introduced in the festivals of the gods by the ignorant devotion of the Romans, but that the gods themselves gave the most urgent commands to this effect, and indeed extorted from the Romans these solemnities and celebrations in their honor.I touched on this in the preceding book, and mentioned that dramatic entertainments were first inaugurated at Rome on occasion of a pestilence, and by authority of the pontiff.And what man is there who is not more likely to adopt, for the regulation of his own life, the examples that are represented in plays which have a divine sanction, rather than the precepts written and promulgated with no more than human authority? If the poets gave a false representation of Jove in describing him as adulterous, then it were to be expected that the chaste gods should in anger avenge so wicked a fiction, in place of encouraging the games which circulated it.Of these plays, the most inoffensive are comedies and tragedies, that is to say, the dramas which poets write for the stage, and which, though they often handle impure subjects, yet do so without the filthiness of language which characterizes many other performances; and it is these dramas which boys are obliged by their seniors to read and learn as a part of what is called a liberal and gentlemanly education.(3)CHAP.9.--THAT THE POETICAL LICENSE WHICH THE GREEKS, IN OBEDIENCE TOTHEIR GODS, ALLOWED, WAS RESTRAINED BY THE ANCIENT ROMANS.
