Thus it appears that the theatre, as far as tragedy was employed,
inculcated frequently as good lessons of morality, as heathenism could
produce, and as far as comedy was concerned, that it became often the
next remedy, after the more grave and moral lectures of the ancient
philosophers, against the prevailing excesses of the times.

But though the theatre professed to encourage virtue, and to censure
vice, yet such a combination of injurious effects was interwoven with
the representations there, arising either from the influence of fiction
upon morals, or from the sight of the degradation of the rational
character by buffoonery, or from the tendency of such representations to
produce levity and dissipation, or from various other causes, that they,
who were the greatest lovers of virtue in those days, and the most
solicitous of improving the moral condition of man, began to consider
them as productive of much more evil than of good. Solon forewarned
Thespis, that the effects of such plays, as he saw him act, would become
in time injurious to the morals of mankind, and he forbade him to act
again. The Athenians, though such performances were afterwards allowed,
would never permit any of their judges to compose a comedy. The
Spartans under Lycurgus, who were the most virtuous of all the people of
Greece, would not suffer either tragedies or comedies to be acted at
all. Plato, as he had banished music, so he banished theatrical
exhibitions from his pure republic. Seneca considered, that vice made
insensible approaches by means of the stage, and that it stole on the
people in the disguise of pleasure. The Romans, in their purer times,
considered the stage to be so disgraceful, that every Roman was to be
degraded, who became an actor, and so pernicious to morals, that they
put it under the power of a censor, to control its effects.