It is remarkable that though Diodorus Siculus makes the inhabitants of Egypt, when conquered by the Romans, amount only to three millions, yet Josephus (_De bello Jud._, lib. 2, cap. 16) says that its inhabitants, excluding those of Alexandria, were seven millions and a half in the reign of Nero, and he expressly says that he drew this account from the books of the Roman publicans who levied the poll-tax. Strabo (lib. 17) praises the superior police of the Romans with regard to the finances of Egypt above that of its former monarchs, and no part of administration is more essential to the happiness of a people; yet we read in Athenæus (lib. 1, cap. 25), who flourished during the reign of the Antonines, that the town Mareia, near Alexandria, which was formerly a large city, had dwindled into a village. This is not, properly speaking, a contradiction. Suidas (August) says that the Emperor Augustus, having numbered the whole Roman Empire, found it contained only 4,101,017 men (ἀνδρες). There is here surely some great mistake, either in the author or transcriber; but this authority, feeble as it is, may be sufficient to counterbalance the exaggerated accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus with regard to more early times.
[100] Lib. 2, cap. 62. It may perhaps be imagined that Polybius, being dependent on Rome, would naturally extol the Roman dominion; but, in the first place, Polybius, though one sees sometimes instances of his caution, discovers no symptoms of flattery. Secondly, this opinion is only delivered in a single stroke, by the by, while he is intent upon another subject, and it is allowed, if there be any suspicion of an author’s insincerity, that these oblique propositions discover his real opinion better than his more formal and direct assertions.
[101] I must confess that that discourse of Plutarch concerning the silence of the oracles is in general of so odd a texture, and so unlike his other productions, that one is at a loss what judgment to form of it. It is written in dialogue, which is a method of composition that Plutarch commonly little affects. The personages he introduces advance very wild, absurd, and contradictory opinions, more like visionary systems or ravings of Plato than the solid sense of Plutarch. There runs also through the whole an air of superstition and credulity which resembles very little the spirit that appears in other philosophical compositions of that author; for it is remarkable that though Plutarch be an historian as superstitious as Herodotus or Livy, yet there is scarcely in all antiquity a philosopher less superstitious, excepting Cicero and Lucian. I must therefore confess that a passage of Plutarch, cited from this discourse, has much less authority with me than if it had been found in most of his other compositions.