Arcesilas, Carneades, and Philo had been too busy with their polemic against Zeno and his followers, maintained on logical grounds, to deal much with ethics.  On the other hand, in the works which Cicero had written and published before the Academica, wherever he had touched philosophy, it had been on its ethical side.  The works themselves, moreover, were direct imitations of early Academic and Peripatetic writers, who, in the rough popular view which regarded ethics mainly or solely, really composed a single school, denoted by the phrase “Vetus Academia.”  General readers, therefore, who considered ethical resemblance as of far greater moment than dialectical difference, would naturally look upon Cicero as a supporter of their “Vetus Academia,” so long as he kept clear of dialectic; when he brought dialectic to the front, and pronounced boldly for Carneades, they would naturally regard him as a deserter from the Old Academy to the New.  This view is confirmed by the fact that for many years before Cicero wrote, the Academic dialectic had found no eminent expositor.  So much was this the case, that when Cicero wrote the Academica he was charged with constituting himself the champion of an exploded and discredited school[96].

Cicero’s ethics, then, stand quite apart from his dialectic.  In the sphere of morals he felt the danger of the principle of doubt.  Even in the De Legibus when the dialogue turns on a moral question, he begs the New Academy, which has introduced confusion into these subjects, to be silent[97].  Again, Antiochus, who in the dialectical dialogue is rejected, is in the De Legibus spoken of with considerable favour[98].  All ethical systems which seemed to afford stability to moral principles had an attraction for Cicero.  He was fascinated by the Stoics almost beyond the power of resistance.  In respect of their ethical and religious ideas he calls them “great and famous philosophers[99],” and he frequently speaks with something like shame of the treatment they had received at the hands of Arcesilas and Carneades.  Once he gives expression to a fear lest they should be the only true philosophers after all[100].  There was a kind of magnificence about the Stoic utterances on morality, more suited to a superhuman than a human world, which allured Cicero more than the barrenness of the Stoic dialectic repelled him[101].  On moral questions, therefore, we often find him going farther in the direction of Stoicism than even his teacher Antiochus.  One great question which divided the philosophers of the time was, whether happiness was capable of degrees.  The Stoics maintained that it was not, and in a remarkable passage Cicero agrees with them, explicitly rejecting the position of Antiochus, that a life enriched by virtue, but unattended by other advantages, might be happy, but could not be the happiest possible[102].  He begs the Academic and Peripatetic schools to cease from giving an uncertain sound (balbutire) and to