Complete Works of Cyprian

and dedicated to Ceres and Liber, and afterwards to the remaining idols and
the dead. Those Greek contests, whether in singing, or in strings, or in
voices, or in feats of strength, have their own presiding various demons:
and whatever else there is which moves the eyes of those watching or
5 entices the ears, if it is sought with its origin and institution, it
brings forward as its cause either an idol, or a demon, or a dead man. Thus
the devil, the artificer, because he knew that idolatry by itself was
horrified, mixed it with spectacles so that it could be loved through
pleasure.
What is the necessity to pursue more, or to describe the monstrous types
10 of sacrifices in the games, among which sometimes even a man becomes a
victim by the robbery of the priest, while the blood, even warm from the
throat, caught in a foaming dish, while it still steams, is cruelly
offered as if to a thirsty idol, and is tossed into its face, and among the
pleasures of the watchers the death of certain ones is spent, so that
15 through the bloody spectacle one learns to be cruel, as if it were too
little for a man to have his own private madness unless he also learns it
publicly. For the punishment of man, a rabid beast is nourished in
delicacies, so that it might rage more cruelly under the eyes of the
spectators. The trainer teaches the beast, which perhaps would have been
20 more gentle if the master had not taught it to be more cruel. Therefore, to
be silent about whatever idolatry more broadly approves, how vain are the
contests themselves, disputes in colors, contentions in chariots,
partisanship in honors, to rejoice that a horse was faster, to mourn that
it was slower, to calculate the years of the beast, to know the consuls,
to learn the ages, to designate the lineage, to remember the grandfathers
themselves and the great-grandfathers. How [vile] this is...