XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls[297] and Scythians to have had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them, than to think that there are Gods who take [Sidenote: C] pleasure in the blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to recognize neither God nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they did offer to Cronus?[298] It was not the case which Empedocles puts against those who sacrifice animals: _Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body, Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool._ Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with [Sidenote: D] never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[300] tells us, is [Sidenote: E] kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[301] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them? XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and [Sidenote: F] precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space. Footnote 262: Polybius (6, 56) points to ‘Deisidaimonia’ as the force which has held the Roman Commonwealth together, and kept the Romans honest. Footnote 263: See Nauck, p. 910 (Hercules speaks). Footnote 264: δεῖμα—δέω: τάρβος—ταράσσω. Footnote 265: Cf. Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 3, 7. Footnote 266: Eur. _Or._ 211-12. Footnote 267: Nauck, p. 910, Fragm. 375 (probably from Aeschylus). Footnote 268: Eur. _Tro._ 759. Footnote 269: Meineke 4, p. 670. Footnote 270: Fr. 95. Footnote 271: Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 376. Footnote 272: