Complete Works of Saint Cyprian

the mass of limbs grows robust with layers of fat, so that, fattened for punishment, the victim may perish more dearly. Man is killed for the pleasure of man, and to be able to kill is skill, it is practice, it is art: wickedness is not only practiced but taught. What can be said to be more inhuman, what more bitter? It is a discipline to be able to destroy, and it is a glory that one destroys. What, I pray, is that matter where men throw themselves to the beasts—men whom no one has condemned—in the prime of their age, with honest appearance, in precious clothing? While alive, they are adorned for a self-sought funeral; they are wretched in their own evils and they boast. They fight against beasts not out of crime, but out of madness. Fathers watch their own sons; a brother is present in the amphitheater and a sister; and if the greater expenditure of the show enhances the price of the spectacle, so that a mother may be present for her own sorrows, the mother even pays for this, woe is me. And in such impious and dire spectacles, they do not consider themselves parricides in the eyes of the onlookers.

8 Turn your face from here to the contagions of a different spectacle, no less to be repented of: in the theaters also you will see what is both a sorrow and a shame to you. There is the tragic actor, recounting ancient crimes in song: the ancient horror of parricides and incests is replicated by action expressed in the image of truth, lest by the passing of ages that which was once committed should fade away. Every age is reminded by hearing that what has been done can be done again. Crimes never die by the senility of time, crime is never buried by the passing of time, crime is never buried in oblivion. Examples are made of things that have already ceased to be crimes. Then, in the mimes, it is pleasing under the tutelage of turpitude to recognize either what one has done at home or what one might do. Adultery is learned while it is seen, and through the evil of public authority pimping for vices, the matron who perhaps had gone to the spectacle as a modest woman returns from the spectacle as an immodest one.