Note 326 — Chapter VI · THE REAL CAUSE OF THE RAPID DECLENSION OF THE ROMAN REPUBLICK.

There is indeed little occasion for an apology for this translation. The judicious critick will easily see, that in this passage there is a plain contrast drawn between the manners of the Grecians and the Romans in the time of Polybius. The cause of that difference this able writer justly ascribes to that δεισιδαιμονία, or awful fear of the gods, so strongly inculcated amongst the Romans, and so much despised and ridiculed amongst the Grecians, who were at that time greatly tinctured with the atheism of Epicurus. The instance he selects in proof, drawn from the very different effect of an oath upon the manners of those two people, must convince us beyond a doubt, that by the words τοῖς ἄλλοις ἀνθρώποις ὀνειδιζόμενον, he plainly characterizes his own countrymen. As by “οἱ νῦν εἰκῇ καὶ ἀλόγως ἐκβάλλειν αὐτὰ,” they who now (that is, in his time) inconsiderately and absurdly reject those great sanctions of religion, he evidently points at such of the leading men amongst the Romans, as in his time had embraced the pernicious tenets of Epicurus. For though he had stigmatized the Carthaginians immediately before their avarice and lust of gain, yet no man knew better than Polybius, that the Carthaginians rather exceeded the Romans in superstition. That they were sincere too in their belief, is evident from that most horrible method, by which they expressed their δεισιδαιμονία, which was their frequent sacrifices of great numbers of their own children (those of the very first families not excepted) to their god Moloch, who, by the Greeks and Romans, was termed Chronos and Saturn.

I thought this remark might not be unuseful, because as none of the commentators have taken any notice of it, so neither Casaubon, nor any translator I have yet met with, seems to have given us the true spirit and meaning of this remarkable passage.