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The opinion of the ancient Romans on this matter is attested by
Cicero in his work De Republica, in which Scipio, one of the
interlocutors, says, "The lewdness of comedy could never have been
suffered by audiences, unless the customs of society had previously
sanctioned the same lewdness." And in the earlier days the Greeks
preserved a certain reasonableness in their license, and made it a
law, that whatever comedy wished to say of any one, it must say it of
him by name. And so in the same work of Cicero's, Scipio says,
"Whom has it not aspersed? Nay, whom has it not worried? Whom has
it spared? Allow that it may assail demagogues and factions, men
injurious to the commonwealth, a Cleon, a Cleophon, a Hyperbolus.
That is tolerable, though it had been more seemly for the public
censor to brand such men, than for a poet to lampoon them; but to
blacken the fame of Pericles with scurrilous verse, after he had with
the utmost dignity presided over their state alike in war and in peace,
was as unworthy of a poet, as if our own Plautus or Naevius were to
bring Publius and Cneius Scipio on the comic stage, or as if
Caecilius were to caricature Cato." And then a little after he goes
on: "Though our Twelve Tables attached the penalty of death only to
a very few offences, yet among these few this was one: if any man
should have sung a pasquinade, or have composed a satire calculated to
bring infamy or disgrace on another person.
Wisely decreed. For it is by the decisions of magistrates, and by a
well-informed justice, that our lives ought to be judged, and not by
the flighty fancies of poets; neither ought we to be exposed to hear
calumnies, save where we have the liberty of replying, and defending
ourselves before an adequate tribunal." This much I have judged it
advisable to quote from the fourth book of Cicero's De Republica;
and I have made the quotation word for word, with the exception of
some words omitted, and some slightly transposed, for the sake of
giving the sense more readily. And certainly the extract is pertinent
to the matter I am endeavoring to explain. Cicero makes some further
remarks, and concludes the passage by showing that the ancient Romans
did not permit any living man to be either praised or blamed on the
stage. But the Greeks, as I said, though not so moral, were more
logical in allowing this license which the Romans forbade; for they
saw that their gods approved and enjoyed the scurrilous language of low
comedy when directed not only against men, but even against
themselves; and this, whether the infamous actions imputed to them
were the fictions of poets, or were their actual iniquities
commemorated and acted in the theatres. And would that the spectators
had judged them worthy only of laughter, and not of imitation!
Manifestly it had been a stretch of pride to spare the good name of the
leading men and the common citizens, when the very deities did not
grudge that their own reputation should be blemished.
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