II.  ‘ACADEMIC QUESTIONS’.

Fragments of two editions of this work have come down to us; for almost before the first copy had reached the hands of his friend Atticus, to whom it was sent, Cicero had rewritten the whole on an enlarged scale.  The first book (as we have it now) is dedicated to Varro, a noble patron of art and literature.  In his villa at Cumae were spacious porticoes and gardens, and a library with galleries and cabinets open to all comers.  Here, on a terrace looking seawards, Cicero, Atticus, and Varro himself pass a long afternoon in discussing the relative merits of the old and new Academies; and hence we get the title of the work.  Varro takes the lion’s share of the first dialogue, and shows how from the “vast and varied genius of Plato” both Academics and Peripatetics drew all their philosophy, whether it related to morals, to nature, or to logic.  Stoicism receives a passing notice, as also does what Varro considers the heresy of Theophrastus, who strips virtue of all its beauty, by denying that happiness depends upon it.

The second book is dedicated to another illustrious name, the elder Lucullus, not long deceased—­half-statesman, half-dilettante, “with almost as divine a memory for facts”, says Cicero, with something of envy, “as Hortensius had for words”.  This time it is at his villa, near Tusculum, amidst scenery perhaps even now the loveliest of all Italian landscapes, that the philosophic dialogue takes place.  Lucullus condemns the scepticism of the New Academy—­those reactionists against the dogmatism of past times, who disbelieve their very eyesight.  If (he says) we reject the testimony of the senses, there is neither body, nor truth, nor argument, nor anything certain left us.  These perpetual doubters destroy every ground of our belief.

Cicero ingeniously defends this scepticism, which was, in fact, the bent of his own mind.  After all, what is our eyesight worth?  The ship sailing across the bay yonder seems to move, but to the sailors it is the shore that recedes from their view.  Even the sun, “which mathematicians affirm to be eighteen times larger than the earth, looks but a foot in diameter”.  And as it is with these things, so it is with all knowledge.  Bold indeed must be the man who can define the point at which belief passes into certainty.  Even the “fine frenzy” of the poet, his pictures of gods and heroes, are as lifelike to himself and to his hearers as though he actually saw them: 

  “See how Apollo, fair-haired god,
  Draws in and bends his golden bow,
  While on the left fair Dian waves her torch”.