ians, all speak after a peculiar
fashion of their own. And even the rhetoricians, whose art is a forensic
one, and wholly directed to the people, still in giving their lessons use
words which are, as it were, their peculiar private property.

II. And, without dwelling on the case of these liberal and gentlemanly
professions, even artisans would not be capable of exercising their trades
properly if they did not use technical words, which are not understood by
us, though in common use among them. Agriculture, also, which is as
distant as can be from all polite refinement, still marks those matters
with which it is conversant by new names. And much more is this course
allowable in a philosopher; for philosophy is the art of life, and a man
who is discussing that cannot borrow his language from the forum,--although
there is no school of philosophers which has made so many innovations as
the Stoics. Zeno too, their chief, was not so much a discoverer of new
things as of new words. But if, even in that language which most people
consider richer than our own, Greece has permitted the most learned men to
use words not in ordinary use about subjects which are equally unusual,
how much more ought the same licence to be granted to us, who are now
venturing to be the very first of our countrymen to touch on such matters?
And though we have often said,--and that, too, in spite of some complaints
not only of the Greeks, but of those men also who would prefer being
accounted Greeks to being thought our own countrymen,--that we are so far
from being surpassed by the Greeks in the richness and copiousness of our
language, that we are even superior to them in that particular; we must
labour to establish this point, not only in our own national arts, but in
those too which we have derived from them. Although, since they have
become established by habit, we may fairly consider those words as our own
which, in accordance with ancient custom, we use as Latin words; such as
_philosophia_ itself, _rhetorica_, _dialectica_, _grammatica_,
_geometria_, _musica_,--although they could, no doubt, be translated into
more genuine Latin.

Enough, however, of the names of things. But with respect to the things
themselves, I am often afraid, Brutus, that I may be blamed when I am
writing to you, who have made so much progress, not only in philosophy,
but in the most excellent kind of philosophy. And if I wrote as if I were
giving you any instruction, I s