Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let us cross over now to the theatrical shows, whose origin in common and matching titles, following the very naming pattern from the beginning of the games, along with their administration bound up with the horse-races, we have already shown. [2] Their trappings, too, are shared partners from that same quarter, by which the procession moves toward the stage from the temples and altars, from that unhappy business of incense and blood, amid pipes and trumpets, escorted by the two most polluted officiants of funerals and sacred rites alike: the undertaker's assistant and the soothsayer. [3] So, having crossed from the origins of the games to the circus games, we now direct ourselves from there to the theatrical games, beginning from the fault of the place. The theater, properly speaking, is a shrine of Venus. This, in fact, is how that kind of structure came to escape notice in the world. [4] For the censors often tore down theaters just as they were rising, out of concern for public morals, foreseeing, no doubt, the grave danger such wantonness posed — so that from this point on the very verdict of the pagans themselves may stand as testimony agreeing with us, and, by this human precedent, add weight to our own discipline. [5] And so Pompey the Great, outdone only by his own theater, once he had built that citadel of every kind of shamelessness, fearing that someday the censors might pass judgment against his memory, capped it with a shrine to Venus, and when he summoned the people by public notice to its dedication, he called it not a theater but a temple of Venus, "beneath which," he said, "we have set tiers for viewing." [6] So he cloaked a work already condemned, and deserving further condemnation, under the title of a temple, and mocked discipline itself with a show of religion. But Venus and Liber suit each other well. Those two demons are conspirators, sworn accomplices, in drunkenness and lust. [7] And so the theater of Venus is also the house of Liber. For they also called other theatrical games, in the strict sense, the Liberalia — apart from those specifically devoted to Liber, which among the Greeks are the Dionysia, likewise instituted in his honor. [8] And plainly, even in the theatrical arts themselves, Liber and Venus hold patronage. What is private and peculiar to the stage — the softness of gesture, the bending of the body — sacrifices to Venus and to Liber: the one through unmanly display, the other through dissolute excess. [9] But what is carried out by voice, by measured rhythm, by instruments, by the written word, has Apollo, the Muses, Minerva, and Mercury as its patrons.
You should hate, Christian, those whose founders you cannot help but hate.
[10] Now we wish to add a further word about the arts, and about those whose founders we curse by name. A dead man's name is nothing, we recognize, and no more is his image; but we are not unaware who it is that operates and rejoices beneath those names and instituted images, and falsely pretends to divinity — wicked spirits, of course: demons. [11] We see, then, that even the arts themselves are dedicated to the honor of those whose names they bear as founders, and are not free of idolatry, since even the founders of these arts are for that reason held to be gods. [12] Indeed, as far as the arts are concerned, we ought to go further back in our case: the demons, foreseeing from the beginning, among their other schemes of idolatry, the pollutions of the spectacles too, by which they might call man away from the Lord and bind him to their own honor, breathed into men the very genius for such arts. [13] For it could not have been managed through others what was meant to reach them, nor would they, in that age, have brought it forth through any other men than those in whose names, images, and legends they arranged to carry out their business of deceitful consecration. To keep the order intact, let us now take up, in turn, a review of the athletic contests.