Sec.Sec.30—­32.  Part iv. of Varro’s Exposition:  Antiochus’ Ethics.  Summary.  Although the old Academics and Peripatetics based knowledge on the senses, they did not make the senses the criterion of truth, but the mind, because it alone saw the permanently real and true (30).  The senses they thought heavy and clogged and unable to gain knowledge of such things as were either too small to come into the domain of sense, or so changing and fleeting that no part of their being remained constant or even the same, seeing that all parts were in a continuous flux.  Knowledge based only on sense was therefore mere opinion (31).  Real knowledge only came through the reasonings of the mind, hence they defined everything about which they argued, and also used verbal explanations, from which they drew proofs.  In these two processes consisted their dialectic, to which they added persuasive rhetoric (32).

Sec.30. Quae erat:  the Platonic [Greek:  en], = was, as we said. In ratione et disserendo:  an instance of Cicero’s fondness for tautology, cf. D.F. I. 22 quaerendi ac disserendi. Quamquam oriretur:  the sentence is inexact, it is knowledge which takes its rise in the senses, not the criterion of truth, which is the mind itself; cf. however II. 30 and n. Iudicium:  the constant translation of [Greek:  kriterion], a word foreign to the older philosophy. Mentem volebant rerum esse iudicem:  Halm with his pet MS. writes esse rerum, thus giving an almost perfect iambic, strongly stopped off before and after, so that there is no possibility of avoiding it in reading.  I venture to say that no real parallel can be found to this in Cic., it stands in glaring contradiction to his own rules about admitting metre in prose, Orator 194 sq., De Or. III. 182 sq. Solam censebant ... tale quale esset:  probably from Plato’s Tim. 35 A thus translated by Cic., Tim. c. 7 ex ea materia quae individua est et unius modi ([Greek:  aei kata tauta echouses] cf. 28 A. [Greek:  to kata tauta echon]) et sui simile, cf. also T.D. I. 58 id solum esse quod semper tale sit quale sit, quam [Greek:  idean] appellat ille, nos speciem, and Ac. II. 129. Illi [Greek:  idean], etc.:  there is more than one difficulty here.  The words iam a Platone ita nom seem to exclude Plato from the supposed old Academico-Peripatetic school.  This may be an oversight, but to say first that the school (illi, cf. sic tractabatur ab utrisque) which included Aristotle held the doctrine of [Greek:  ideai], and next, in 33, that Aristotle crushed the same doctrine, appears very absurd.  We may reflect, however, that the difference between Plato’s [Greek:  ideai] and Aristotle’s [Greek:  ta kathalou] would naturally seem microscopic to Antiochus.  Both theories were practically as dead in his time as those of Thales or Anaxagoras.  The confusion must not be laid at Cicero’s door, for Antiochus in reconciling his own dialectics with Plato’s must have been driven to desperate shifts.  Cicero’s very knowledge of Plato has, however, probably led him to intensify what inconsistency there was in Antiochus, who would have glided over Plato’s opinions with a much more cautious step.