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The Shows

Chapter XXII.

What wonder is there in it? Such inconsistencies as these are just such as we might expect from men, who confuse and change the nature of good and evil in their inconstancy of feeling and fickleness in judgment. Why, the authors and managers of the spectacles, in that very respect with reference to which they highly laud the charioteers, and actors, and wrestlers, and those most loving gladiators, to whom men prostitute their souls, women too their bodies, slight and trample on them, though for their sakes they are guilty of the deeds they reprobate; nay, they doom them to ignominy and the loss of their rights as citizens, excluding them from the Curia, and the rostra, from senatorial and equestrian rank, and from all other honours as well as certain distinctions. What perversity! They have pleasure in those whom yet they punish; they put all slights on those to whom, at the same time, they award their approbation; they magnify the art and brand the artist. What an outrageous thing it is, to blacken a man on account of the very things which make him meritorious in their eyes! Nay, what a confession that the things are evil, when their authors, even in highest favour, are not without a mark of disgrace upon them!

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De spectaculis

22

1 quid mirum? inaequata ista hominum miscentium et commutantium statum boni et mali per inconstantiam sensus et iudicii varietatem. 2 etenim ipsi auctores et administratores spectaculorum quadrigarios scaenicos xysticos arenarios illos amatissimos, quibus viri animas, feminae autem illis etiam corpora sua substernunt, propter quos se in ea committunt quae reprehendunt, ex eadem arte, qua magnifaciunt, deponunt et deminuunt, immo manifeste damnant ignominia et capitis minutione, arcentes curia rostris senatu equite ceterisque honoribus omnibus simul et ornamentis quibusdam. 3 quanta perversitas! amant quos multant, depretiant quos probant, artem magnificant, artificem notant. 4 quale iudicium est, ut ob ea quis offuscetur, per quae promeretur? immo quanta confessio est malae rei! cuius auctores, cum acceptissimi sint, sine nota non sunt.