Book 3

[Book III likewise survives only in fragments. It opened with a Prooemium (the same preface that Cicero, by his own admission in a letter to Atticus, once mistakenly reused elsewhere). The surviving pieces follow.]

[Prooemium]

…that, amid so great a variety of living creatures, in man alone there should be implanted a desire for knowledge and understanding.

But if it were granted, as to those who have strayed on a journey, so to those who have followed a wandering course of life, to correct their error by repentance, the amending of rashness would be easier.

But to be forever fighting it out, to do battle among the criminal and the reckless—who would not call this both most wretched and also most foolish?

…[if] there is any power, let it claim itself into liberty.

To me, however, we seem blind not only as regards wisdom, but, even as regards those very things which seem in some part to be discerned, dull and blunted.

[He says] that he held a discussion with Marcus Varro—

a man easily the most acute of all and, beyond any doubt, the most learned.

"fixed" [fixus]

[Editorial note: "The remaining fragments of Books III and IV will be subscribed, each in its own place, to the Lucullus."]