Academics

and those who, as certain Academics are said to have laid down, hold that the uttermost of goods and the highest office of the wise man is to withstand appearances and firmly to sustain his assents.

in this place I say only this much — that by the old Peripatetics and Academics, who agreed in substance but differed in terms, that subject which we may rightly call the civil (the Greeks politikon) was treated gravely and copiously.

or the first things of nature, as the ancients, whom we have named both Academics and Peripatetics.

"How rash of me, to have ventured to engage with an Academic who is at the same time a rhetorician!

And when these matters are argued more fully and at greater length, as I am minded to do, they more easily escape the cavil of the Academics;

For it befits a philosopher, a pontiff, and Cotta to hold about the immortal gods an opinion not wandering and unsettled, as the Academics do, but, as we Stoics do, firm and certain.

We, then, who are called Academics (or do we abuse the glory of the name?

‘Carneades went down to the Academy’—and yet it is not without causes;

he borrows subtlety from the Academy and in turn repays it with fullness of expression and the ornaments of speech.

‘But since your rhetorical works are known to me, and I have often heard you in them and shall hear you again, and since your Tusculan Disputations show that you have taken up this practice of the Academics of arguing against a proposition, I should like, if it is no trouble to you, to lay down some thesis for me to listen to.

In whose youth I see that the Stoic Diogenes and the Academic Carneades were sent as envoys to the senate by the Athenians;

let them fight it out, for all I care, since for me it is necessary only to inquire where that is which seems most like the truth.

And so of that true and elegant philosophy, which, drawn from Socrates, has hitherto persisted among the Peripatetics, and likewise among the Stoics who say the same things in another manner, while the Academics decided their controversies, there are scarcely any, or very few, Latin monuments — whether on account of the greatness of the matters and the engagements of men, or even because they did …

The old Academics confess that a man is indeed happy even amid these torments, but not to perfection nor to fullness.

The faith of these the Academics too harshly condemn — according to some, Heraclitus too and Diocles and Empedocles;

" We acknowledge, then, the contradictable sign — the conception and delivery of the virgin Mary, of which those Academics say, "She bore and bore not, a virgin and no virgin" — as though, even if it were to be so said, it would not better befit us to say it.