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The actors of virtue and sin.  Among the men of antiquity famed for their virtue there were, it appears, a countless number who play-acted before themselves: the Greeks especially, as actors incarnate, will have done this quite involuntarily and have approved it. Everyone, moreover, was with his virtue in competition with the virtue of another or of all others: how should one not have employed every kind of art to bring one's virtue to public attention, above all before oneself, even if only for the sake of practice! Of what use was a virtue one could not exhibit or which did not know how to exhibit itself!  Christianity put paid to these actors of virtue: in their place it invented the repellent flaunting of sin, it introduced into the world sinfulness one has lyingly made up (to this very day it counts as 'good form' among good Christians).