Very few words are necessary in order to characterize Cicero’s estimate of the Peripatetic and Epicurean schools.  The former was not very powerfully represented during his lifetime.  The philosophical descendants of the author of the Organon were notorious for their ignorance of logic[112], and in ethics had approximated considerably to the Stoic teaching.  While not much influenced by the school, Cicero generally treats it tenderly for the sake of its great past, deeming it a worthy branch of the true Socratic family.  With the Epicureans the case was different.  In physics they stood absolutely alone, their system was grossly unintellectual, and they discarded mathematics.  Their ethical doctrines excited in Cicero nothing but loathing, dialectic they did not use, and they crowned all their errors by a sin which the orator could never pardon, for they were completely indifferent to every adornment and beauty of language.

III. The aim of Cicero in writing his philosophical works.

It is usual to charge Cicero with a want of originality as a philosopher, and on that score to depreciate his works.  The charge is true, but still absurd, for it rests on a misconception, not merely of Cicero’s purpose in writing, but of the whole spirit of the later Greek speculation.  The conclusion drawn from the charge is also quite unwarranted.  If the later philosophy of the Greeks is of any value, Cicero’s works are of equal value, for it is only from them that we get any full or clear view of it.  Any one who attempts to reconcile the contradictions of Stobaeus, Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch and other authorities, will perhaps feel little inclination to cry out against the confusion of Ciceros ideas.  Such outcry, now so common, is due largely to the want, which I have already noticed, of any clear exposition of the variations in doctrine which the late Greek schools exhibited during the last two centuries before the Christian era.  But to return to the charge of want of originality.  This is a virtue which Cicero never claims.  There is scarcely one of his works (if we except the third book of the De Officiis), which he does not freely confess to be taken wholly from Greek sources.  Indeed at the time when he wrote, originality would have been looked upon as a fault rather than an excellence.  For two centuries, if we omit Carneades, no one had propounded anything substantially novel in philosophy:  there had been simply one eclectic combination after another of pre-existing tenets.  It would be hasty to conclude that the writers of these two centuries are therefore undeserving of our study, for the spirit, if not the substance of the doctrines had undergone a momentous change, which ultimately exercised no unimportant influence on society and on the Christian religion itself.