everything that is most
recent is corrected and amended in the highest degree; although Philo, the
master of Antiochus, a great man, as you yourself consider him, used to
deny in his books that there were two Academies (and we ourselves have
heard him assert the same things in his lectures); and he convicts those
who say that there are, of palpable mistake. It is as you say, said he,
but I do not imagine that you are ignorant of what Antiochus has written
in reply to the arguments of Philo. Certainly, said I, I am not, and I
should like to hear the whole cause of the Old Academy, from which I have
been so long absent, recapitulated by you, if it is not giving you too
much trouble; and let us sit down now, if you have no objection. That will
suit me very well, said he, for I am not at all strong. But let us
consider whether Atticus will be pleased with that compliance of mine,
which I see that you yourself are desirous of. Indeed I shall, said he;
for what could I prefer to being reminded of what I long ago heard from
Antiochus, and seeing at the same time whether those ideas can be
expressed with sufficient suitableness in Latin? So after this preface we
all sat down looking at one another. And Varro began as follows:--

Socrates appears to me, and indeed it is the universal opinion, to have
been the first person who drew philosophy away from matters of an abstruse
character, which had been shrouded in mystery by nature herself, and in
which all the philosophers before his time had been wholly occupied, and
to have diverted it to the objects of ordinary life; directing its
speculations to virtues and vices, and generally to whatever was good or
bad. And he thought that the heavenly bodies were either far out of the
reach of our knowledge, or that, even if we became ever so intimately
acquainted with them, they had no influence on living well. In nearly all
his discourses, which have been reported in great variety and very fully
by those who were his pupils, he argues in such a manner that he affirms
nothing himself, but refutes the assertions of others. He says that he
knows nothing, except that one fact, that he is ignorant; and that he is
superior to others in this particular, that they believe that they do know
what they do not, while he knows this one thing alone, that he knows
nothing. And it is on that account that he imagines he was pronounced by
Apollo the wisest of all men, because this alone is the whole of wis