who limit their ideas of good
speaking by the hopes which they conceive of what they themselves may
attain to, and who declare, when they are overwhelmed with a flow of words
and sentences, that they prefer the utmost poverty of thought and
expression to that plenty and copiousness; (from which arose the Attic
kind of oratory, which they who professed it were strangers to, though
they have now been some time silenced, and laughed out of the very courts
of justice;) what may I not expect, when at present I cannot have the
least countenance from the people, by whom I used to be upheld before? For
philosophy is satisfied with a few judges, and of her own accord
industriously avoids the multitude, who are jealous of it, and utterly
displeased with it; so that, should any one undertake to cry down the
whole of it, he would have the people on his side; while, if he should
attack that school which I particularly profess, he would have great
assistance from those of the other philosophers.

II. But I have answered the detractors of philosophy in general, in my
Hortensius. And what I had to say in favour of the Academics, is, I think,
explained with sufficient accuracy in my four books of the Academic
Question.

But yet I am so far from desiring that no one should write against me,
that it is what I most earnestly wish; for philosophy would never have
been in such esteem in Greece itself, if it had not been for the strength
which it acquired from the contentions and disputations of the most
learned men; and therefore I recommend all men who have abilities to
follow my advice, to snatch this art also from declining Greece, and to
transport it to this city; as our ancestors by their study and industry
have imported all their other arts, which were worth having. Thus the
praise of oratory, raised from a low degree, is arrived at such
perfection, that it must now decline, and, as is the nature of all things,
verge to its dissolution in a very short time. Let philosophy then derive
its birth in Latin language from this time, and let us lend it our
assistance, and bear patiently to be contradicted and refuted; and
although those men may dislike such treatment who are bound and devoted to
certain predetermined opinions, and are under such obligations to maintain
them that they are forced, for the sake of consistency, to adhere to them
even though they do not themselves wholly approve of them; we, on the
other hand, who pursue only pr