Übersetzung ausblenden
Ad Donatum

7.

And now, if you turn your eyes and your regards to the cities themselves, you will behold a concourse more fraught with sadness than any solitude. The gladiatorial games are prepared, that blood may gladden the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up with stronger food, and the vigorous mass of limbs is enriched with brawn and muscle, that the wretch fattened for punishment may die a harder death. Man is slaughtered that man may be gratified, and the skill that is best able to kill is an exercise and an art. Crime is not only committed, but it is taught. What can be said more inhuman,--what more repulsive? Training is undergone to acquire the power to murder, and the achievement of murder is its glory. What state of things, I pray you, can that be, and what can it be like, in which men, whom none have condemned, offer themselves to the wild beasts--men of ripe age, of sufficiently beautiful person, clad in costly garments? Living men, they are adorned for a voluntary death; wretched men, they boast of their own miseries. They fight with beasts, not for their crime, but for their madness. Fathers look on their own sons; a brother is in the arena, and his sister is hard by; and although a grander display of pomp increases the price of the exhibition, yet, oh shame! even the mother will pay the increase in order that she may be present at her own miseries. And in looking upon scenes so frightful and so impious and so deadly, they do not seem to be aware that they are parricides with their eyes.

Edition ausblenden
Ad Donatum (CSEL)

§ 7

Iam si ad urbes ipsas ocujos tuos atque ora conuertas, celebritatem offendes omni solitudine tristiorem. paratur gladiatorius ludus, ut libidinem crudelium luminum sanguis oblectet. inpletur in sucum cibis fortioribus corpus, et aruinae toris ¹P. 9 membroram² moles robusta pinguescit, ut saginatus in poenam carius pereat. homo occiditur in hominis uoluptatem, et ut quis possit occidere, peritia est, usus est, ars est: scelus non tantum geritur sed docetur. quid potest inhumanius³, quid acerbius dici? disciplina est, ut perimere quis possit, et gloria est, quod perimit⁴ quid illud, oro te, quale est, ubi se feris obiciunt, quos nemo damnauit⁵, aetate integra, honesta satis forma, ueste pretiosa? umentes⁶ in ultroneum funus ornantur, malis suis miseri et gloriantur. pugnant ad bestias non crimine sed furore. spectant filios suos patres, frater in cauea et soror praesto est, et spectaculi licet pretium largior muneris adparatus amplificet, ut maeroribus suis mater intersit, hoc pro dolor mater et redimit. et in tam impiis spectaculis tamque diris esse se non putant oculis parricidas.