Areopagitica | Page 4

their philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by
no less a man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to
dismiss them speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy.
But Scipio and others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old
Sabine austerity; honoured and admired the men; and the censor
himself at last, in his old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he
was so scrupulous. And yet at the same time Naevius and Plautus, the
first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed scenes
of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered there also
what was to be done to libellous books and authors; for Naevius was
quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and released by the
tribunes upon his recantation; we read also that libels were burnt, and
the makers punished by Augustus. The like severity, no doubt, was
used, if aught were impiously written against their esteemed gods.

Except in these two points, how the world went in books, the
magistrate kept no reckoning.
And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his Epicurism
to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by
Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself
disputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical
sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by
any order prohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius,
though it extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore
suppressed by Octavius Caesar of the other faction. But that Naso was
by him banished in his old age, for the wanton poems of his youth, was
but a mere covert of state over some secret cause: and besides, the
books were neither banished nor called in. From hence we shall meet
with little else but tyranny in the Roman empire, that we may not
marvel, if not so often bad as good books were silenced. I shall
therefore deem to have been large enough, in producing what among
the ancients was punishable to write; save only which, all other
arguments were free to treat on.
By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in
this point I do not find to have been more severe than what was
formerly in practice. The books of those whom they took to be grand
heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned in the general
Councils; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt, by authority of the
emperor. As for the writings of heathen authors, unless they were plain
invectives against Christianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they
met with no interdict that can be cited, till about the year 400, in a
Carthaginian Council, wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read
the books of Gentiles, but heresies they might read: while others long
before them, on the contrary, scrupled more the books of heretics than
of Gentiles. And that the primitive Councils and bishops were wont
only to declare what books were not commendable, passing no further,
but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to lay by, till after the
year 800, is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great unmasker of the
Trentine Council.

After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of
political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's
eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting
to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the
books not many which they so dealt with: till Martin V., by his bull, not
only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of
heretical books; for about that time Wickliffe and Huss, growing
terrible, were they who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of
prohibiting. Which course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the
Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together
brought forth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes,
that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a
violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they
stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate,
they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new
purgatory of an index.
To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to
ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St.
Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise)
unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three
glutton friars. For example:
Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this