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| That Plato, Who Excluded Poets from a Well-Ordered City, Was Better Than These Gods Who Desire to Be Honoured by Theatrical Plays.
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Chapter 14.—That Plato, Who
Excluded Poets from a Well-Ordered City, Was Better Than These Gods
Who Desire to Be Honoured by Theatrical Plays.
We have still to inquire why the
poets who write the plays, and who by the law of the twelve tables
are prohibited from injuring the good name of the citizens, are
reckoned more estimable than the actors, though they so shamefully
asperse the character of the gods? Is it right that the actors of
these poetical and God-dishonoring effusions be branded, while
their authors are honored? Must we not here award the palm to a
Greek, Plato, who, in framing his ideal republic,105
| 105 See the Republic, book
iii. | conceived that poets should be
banished from the city as enemies of the state? He could not
brook that the gods be brought into disrepute, nor that the minds
of the citizens be depraved and besotted, by the fictions of the
poets. Compare now human nature as you see it in Plato, expelling
poets from the city that the citizens be uninjured, with the divine
nature as you see it in these gods exacting plays in their own
honor. Plato strove, though unsuccessfully, to persuade the
light-minded and lascivious Greeks to abstain from so much as
writing such plays; the gods used their authority to extort the
acting of the same from the dignified and sober-minded Romans.
And not content with having them acted, they had them dedicated to
themselves, consecrated to themselves, solemnly celebrated in their
own honor. To which, then, would it be more becoming in a state
to decree divine honors,—to Plato, who prohibited these wicked
and licentious plays, or to the demons who delighted in blinding
men to the truth of what Plato unsuccessfully sought to
inculcate?
This philosopher, Plato, has been
elevated by Labeo to the rank of a demigod, and set thus upon a
level with such as Hercules and Romulus. Labeo ranks demigods
higher than heroes, but both he counts among the deities. But I
have no doubt that he thinks this man whom he reckons a demigod
worthy of greater respect not only than the heroes, but also than
the gods themselves. The laws of the Romans and the speculations
of Plato have this resemblance, that the latter pronounce a
wholesale condemnation of poetical fictions, while the former
restrain the license of satire, at least so far as men are the
objects of it. Plato will not suffer poets even to dwell in his
city: the laws of Rome prohibit actors from being enrolled as
citizens; and if they had not feared to offend the gods who had
asked the services of the players, they would in all likelihood
have banished them altogether. It is obvious, therefore, that the
Romans could not receive, nor reasonably expect to receive, laws
for the regulation of their conduct from their gods, since the laws
they themselves enacted far surpassed and put to shame the morality
of the gods. The gods demand stageplays in their own honor; the
Romans exclude the players from all civic honors;106
| 106 Comp. Tertullian, De
Spectac. c. 22. | the former commanded that they
should be celebrated by the scenic representation of their own
disgrace; the latter commanded that no poet should dare to blemish
the reputation of any citizen. But that demigod Plato resisted
the lust of such gods as these, and showed the Romans what their
genius had left incomplete; for he absolutely excluded poets from
his ideal state, whether they composed fictions with no regard to
truth, or set the worst possible examples before wretched men under
the guise of divine actions. We for our part, indeed, reckon
Plato neither a god nor a
demigod; we would not even
compare him to any of God’s holy angels; nor to the
truth-speaking prophets, nor to any of the apostles or martyrs of
Christ, nay, not to any faithful Christian man. The reason of
this opinion of ours we will, God prospering us, render in its own
place. Nevertheless, since they wish him to be considered a
demigod, we think he certainly is more entitled to that rank, and
is every way superior, if not to Hercules and Romulus (though no
historian could ever narrate nor any poet sing of him that he had
killed his brother, or committed any crime), yet certainly to
Priapus, or a Cynocephalus,107
| 107 The Egyptian gods represented with
dogs’ heads, called by Lucan (viii. 832) semicanes
deos. | or the Fever,108
| 108 The Fever had, according to Vives,
three altars in Rome. See Cicero, De Nat. Deor. iii. 25,
and Ælian, Var. Hist. xii. 11. | —divinities whom the Romans have
partly received from foreigners, and partly consecrated by
home-grown rites. How, then, could gods such as these be expected
to promulgate good and wholesome laws, either for the prevention of
moral and social evils, or for their eradication where they had
already sprung up?—gods who used their influence even to sow and
cherish profligacy, by appointing that deeds truly or falsely
ascribed to them should be published to the people by means of
theatrical exhibitions, and by thus gratuitously fanning the flame
of human lust with the breath of a seemingly divine approbation.
In vain does Cicero, speaking of poets, exclaim against this state
of things in these words: “When the plaudits and acclamation of
the people, who sit as infallible judges, are won by the poets,
what darkness benights the mind, what fears invade, what passions
inflame it!”109
| 109 Cicero, De Republica, v.
Compare the third Tusculan Quæst. c. ii. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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