Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/68

 thing that seditious citizens are in the habit of doing when they bring forward some illustrious men of the ancients, who they say were friends of the people, in the hope of being themselves considered like them. They go back to Publius Valerius, who was consul the first year after the expulsion of the kings. They enumerate all the other men who have passed laws for the advantage of the people concerning appeals when they were consuls; and then they come down to these better known men, Caius Flaminius, who, as tribune of the people, passed an Agrarian law some years before the second Punic war, against the will of the senate, and who was afterwards twice elected consul; to Lucius Cassius and Quintus Pompeius; they are also in the habit of classing Publius Africanus in the same list; and they assert that those two brothers of infinite wisdom and exceeding glory, Publius Crassus and Publius Scævola, were the advisers of Tiberius Gracchus, in the matter of the laws which he proposed; the one, indeed, as we see, openly; the other, as we suspect, in a more concealed manner. They add also Caius Marius; and with respect to him they speak truly enough: then, having recounted the names of so many illustrious men, they say that they are acting up to their principles.

In like manner, you, when you are seeking to overturn a well-established system of philosophy, in the same way as those men endeavoured to overturn the republic, bring forward the names of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and even Plato and Socrates. But Saturninus, (that I may name my own enemy rather than any one else,) had nothing in him resembling those ancient men; nor are the ungrounded accusations of Arcesilas to be compared to the modesty of Democritus. And yet those natural philosophers, though very seldom, when they have any very great difficulty, make loud and violent outcries, as if under the influence of some great excitement, Empedocles, indeed, does so to such a degree, that he appears to me at times to be mad, crying out that all things are hidden, that we feel nothing, see nothing, and cannot find out the true character of anything whatever. But for the most part all those men appear to me to affirm some things rather too positively, and to profess that they know more than they really do know. But if they then hesitated while discussing new subjects, like children lately born, are we for that reason