n in Rome as
compared with that in Greece. He says on this subject:

"The greatest advantage of the Roman constitution seems to me to lie in
its conception of the gods, and I believe that what among other peoples is
despised is what holds together the Roman power--I mean superstition. For
this feature has by them been developed so far in the direction of the
'horrible,' and has so permeated both private and public life, that it is
quite unique. Many will perhaps find this strange, but I think they have
acted so with an eye to the mass of the people. For if it were possible to
compose a state of reasonable people such a procedure would no doubt be
unnecessary, but as every people regarded as a mass is easily impressed
and full of criminal instincts, unreasonable violence, and fierce passion,
there is nothing to be done but to keep the masses under by vague fears
and such-like hocus-pocus. Therefore it is my opinion that it was not
without good reason or by mere chance that the ancients imparted to the
masses the notions of the gods and the underworld, but rather is it
thoughtless and irrational when nowadays we seek to destroy them."

As a proof of this last statement follows a comparison between the state
of public morals in Greece and in Rome. In Greece you cannot trust a man
with a few hundred pounds without ten notaries and as many seals and
double the number of witnesses; in Rome great public treasure is
administered with honesty merely under the safeguard of an oath.

As we see, this passage contains direct evidence that in the second
century in Hellas--in contradistinction to Rome--there was an attempt to
break down the belief in the gods. By his "we" Polybius evidently referred
especially to the leading political circles. He knew these circles from
personal experience, and his testimony has all the more weight because he
does not come forward in the role of the orthodox man complaining in the
usual way of the impiety of his contemporaries; on the contrary, he speaks
as the educated and enlightened man to whom it is a matter of course that
all this talk about the gods and the underworld is a myth which nobody
among the better classes takes seriously. This is a tone we have not heard
before, and it is a strong indirect testimony to the fact that Polybius is
not wrong when he speaks of disbelief among the upper classes of Greece.

In this connexion the work of Polybius has a certain interest on another
point. Wher