Laudator Temporis Acti

Tertullian, On Spectacles 30.3-5 (tr. T.R. Glover):

[3] How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide! What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation? as I see all those kings, those great kings, welcomed (we were told) in heaven, along with Jove, along with those who told of their ascent, groaning in the depths of darkness! And the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians! [4] those sages, too, the philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together, the disciples whom they taught that God was concerned with nothing, that men have no souls at all, or that what souls they have shall never return to their former bodies! And, then, the poets trembling before the judgement-seat, not of Rhadamanthus, not of Minos, but of Christ whom they never looked to see! [5] And then there will be the tragic actors to be heard, more vocal in their own tragedy; and the players to be seen, lither of limb by far in the fire; and then the charioteer to watch, red all over in the wheel of flame; and, next, the athletes to be gazed upon, not in their gymnasiums but hurled in the fire—unless it be that not even then would I wish to see them, in my desire rather to turn an insatiable gaze on them who vented their rage and fury on the Lord.

[3] quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! quid admirer? quid rideam? ubi gaudeam, ubi exultem, tot spectans reges, qui in caelum recepti nuntiabantur, cum Iove ipso et ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes? item praesides persecutores dominici nominis saevioribus quam ipsi flammis saevierunt insultantes contra Christianos liquescentes? [4] quos praeterea? sapientes illos philosophos coram discipulis suis una conflagrantibus erubescentes, quibus nihil ad deum pertinere suadebant, quibus animas aut nullas aut non in pristina corpora redituras adfirmabant? etiam poetas non ad Rhadamanthi nec ad Minonis, sed ad inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes? [5] tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores multo per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga in flammea rota totus ruber; tunc xystici contemplandi, non in gymnasiis, sed in igne iaculati, nisi quod ne tunc quidem illos velim visos, ut qui malim ad eos potius conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum desaevierunt.

D.A. Russell included this purple passage in An Anthology of Latin Prose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 207-208. Friedrich Nietzsche quoted it in On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 15.

On the text of 30.3 see Wilhelm von Hartel, Zu Tertullian De Spectaculis, De Idolatria (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1890), pp. 38-39.

Related post: Hell.