Speusippus

Speusippus succeeds Plato;

For Speusippus, in the first book against Cleophon, seems to write the like to Plato through this:

" And Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, says that happiness is a perfect state in those who are according to nature, or a state of goods, of which condition all men have appetite, but the good aim at freedom from disturbance.

The Pythagoreans seem to give a more probable doctrine on the subject of the Good when they place Unity in their column of goods;

Speusippus attempted to refute this argument by saying that, as the greater is opposed to the equal as well as to the less, so pleasure is opposed to a neutral state of feeling as well as to pain.

'I think, then, Cato,' said I, 'that those old hearers of Plato — Speusippus, Aristotle, Xenocrates, and then their successors, Polemo, Theophrastus — had a doctrine sufficiently and copiously and elegantly established, so that there was no cause for Zeno, when he had heard Polemo, why he should differ both from that very man and from his predecessors.

and those little gardens of his, close by, not only bring me the memory of him, but seem to set the man himself before my sight.

'Although this perhaps cannot so pass off, since he is present' — he meant me — 'yet I shall dare to call you from this New Academy to that old one, in which, as you heard Antiochus say, are counted not those alone who are called Academics — Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, Crantor, and the rest — but also the old Peripatetics, whose chief is Aristotle, whom, except Plato, I know not whether I migh …

I do not, then, readily grant either to my Brutus, or to our common masters, or to those ancients, Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, that, since they count among evils the things which I enumerated above, they should also say the wise man is always happy.

There will follow, then, by the reasoning of these men, the happy life along with virtue even to punishment, and with it will go down into the bull, on the authority of Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus, Polemo, nor will it, corrupted by threats or blandishments, desert it.

whereupon my father furnished surieties and brought an action against Speusippus for making an illegal proposal.

when prosecuting Speusippus for making an illegal proposal, one thing upon which my father insisted repeatedly was that he had never visited Pherecles at Themacus in his life;

But Speusippus and Xenocrates, who were the first to take up Plato's method and authority, and after them Polemo and Crates, and together with them Crantor, gathered in the Academy, diligently maintained what they had received from their predecessors.

For when Plato had left his sister's son Speusippus as, so to speak, the heir of his philosophy, but had also left two men of the most outstanding zeal and learning, Xenocrates of Chalcedon and Aristotle of Stagira, those who were with Aristotle were called Peripatetics, because they disputed while walking about in the Lyceum, whereas the others, because by Plato's institution they were accustomed …

And not much otherwise Speusippus, following his uncle Plato and speaking of a certain force by which all things are governed, and that an animate one, tries to root out from our minds the knowledge of the gods.

Xenocrates and Speusippus think that a man can be made happy by virtue alone, yet that the honourable is not the one good.

"You, Speusippus, rebuke that little slave with the lash;

and I hear that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school perished in adultery.