Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] There remains a review of that most conspicuous and most popular of spectacles. It is called a "munus," a duty-offering, from "officium," since "officium" is also a name for a duty owed. Now the ancients believed they were performing this spectacle as a duty to the dead, after they had tempered its original savagery into something more humane. [2] For long ago, since it was believed that the souls of the departed were propitiated with human blood, people would buy captives or slaves of poor standing and sacrifice them at funerals. [3] Later it was decided to gloss over the impiety with pleasure. And so those they had procured were trained — insofar as they then could be, and however they could be — in the use of such weapons as were available, merely so that they might learn to be killed; then, on the appointed day of the funeral offerings, they were dispatched at the tombs. Thus they consoled death with more murder. [4] Such was the origin of the "munus." But little by little, advanced to as much favor as it had once had cruelty, because it was not enough to satisfy the pleasure of wild beasts unless human bodies too were torn apart for them. So what was offered as a sacrifice to the dead was, in fact, reckoned to their honor-rite; and this class of thing is accordingly a species of idolatry, since idolatry too is a species of honor-rite: the one ministers to the dead as much as the other. [5] But in the idols of the dead, demons take up residence.
And to take the titles into account as well — though this class of exhibition has by now passed from honors paid to the dead into honors paid to the living, I mean quaestorships and magistracies and priesthoods of the flamens and other priesthoods — still, since the dignity of the very name is held fast by the charge of idolatry, whatever is administered under the name of that dignity must necessarily share also in the stains from which it derives its occasions. [6] We shall interpret the trappings the same way, reckoning them among the very furnishings set up for these honors: the purple, the fasces, the fillets, the crowns, and finally the public announcements, the edicts, and even the ceremonial porridge of the day before — none of these is without the pomp of the devil, none without the summoning of demons. [7] What then shall I say of that dreadful place, which not even perjuries can endure? For the amphitheater is consecrated under more numerous and harsher names than the Capitol: it is the temple of every demon there is. As many unclean spirits settle there as it holds men. And to conclude on the arts as well: we know Mars and Diana as the presiding powers of both kinds of contest.