Augustine on security and entertainment

I am impressed with how similar our cultural conditions are to the days of Augustine, who wrote the following in the early 400's AD, in his City of God:

... why is it that you put the blame on this Christian era, when things go wrong? Is it not because you are anxious to enjoy your vices without interference, and to wallow in your corruption, untroubled and un-rebuked? For if you are concerned for peace and general prosperity, it is not because you want to make decent use of these blessings, with moderation, with restraint, with self-control, with reverence. No! It is because you seek an infinite variety of pleasures with a crazy extravagance, and your prosperity produces moral corruption far worse than all the fury of an enemy.

Augustine then goes on to praise a pagan high priest from Roman history, Scipio Nasica, who lived in the second century BC. Our translator clarifies that Augustine confuses Scipio Nasica with his (Nasica's) son, but this doesn't diminish Augustine's point, which is to argue that even this pagan high priest saw the connection between endless comfort and pleasure with moral decay. Interestingly, Augustine then cites two examples from Nasica: one from warfare and one from entertainment (I add the italics):

From warfare: ... The great Scipio ... dreaded that this calamity would come upon you. For that reason he opposed the destruction of Carthage, Rome's imperial rival at that time ... He was afraid of security ... And his policy was justified; the event proved him right. The abolition of Carthage certainly removed a fearful threat to the State of Rome; and the extinction of that threat was immediately followed by disasters arising from prosperity: ... a succession of disastrous quarrels and all the slaughter of the civil wars, all the torrents of bloodshed, all the greed and monstrous seething cruelty of proscriptions and expropriations, so that the Romans, who in a period of high moral standards stood in fear of their enemies, suffered a harsher fate from their fellow-citizens when those standards collapsed...

From entertainment: ... It was the same conviction, the same patriotic forethought which lead the same [Scipio Nasica] ... to restrain the senate's project to build a theater. He deflected them from this ambitious design, and used all the weight of his authority in a speech which persuaded them not to allow Greek corruption to infiltrate into the virile morality of Rome, and to have no truck with depravity which would undermine and weaken the Roman moral character. Such was the force of his authority that the senate, moved by his eloquence, had the wisdom to forbid for the future the erection of the temporary stands which the State had by now begun to provide for the spectators of the games ...

(From the translator: The prohibition to build theaters was passed by the senate in 155 BC; the first stone theater was built in 55 BC).

Today, we hear more about the craving of the Roman citizenry for the "games," which included the butchery of Christians by animals in the arenas. That came later, about two centuries after Scipio Nasica. The Roman Colosseum was built in about 70 AD.

Logos2Go

Augustine, City of God, Book I, Sections 30, 31. Translated by Henry Bettenson (Penguin, 1984), 42-43.