Introduction to the Philosophy of Saint Augustine
of all your detailed arguments. Such cruelty is not at all in accordance with your humanity!"
15. And so I, when I noticed that the others, too, wanted this, began, as it were anew. "I shall do as you wish," I said, "although I had hoped that after my toil in the rhetoric school, I should find some rest in this light armour—that is, I should conduct these enquiries by question and answer rather than by exposition— nevertheless, since we are so few and it will not be necessary for me to raise my voice beyond what is good for my health and since I have also wished that the pen should, so to speak, guide and control my discourse—also on account of my health, lest I become more excited mentally than is good for my body—listen, then, to my opinion, given to you, as you wish in continuous exposition.
"In the first place, however, let us examine a point about which the enthusiastic supporters of the Academics are very boastful. There is in the books which Cicero wrote in support of them a certain passage that to me seems seasoned with rare wit, while some think it a passage of great power and conviction. It would be hard to imagine that any man should not be impressed by what is there written."
Everybody of every other school that claims to be wise gives the second place to the wise man of the Academy. It is inevitable, of course, that each claims the first place for himself. From this one can conclude with probability that the Academic rightly judges himself as holding the first place, since in the judgment of all the others he holds the second.
16. Suppose, for example, that there is a Stoic wise man present. It was against the Stoics especially that the Academics felt called upon to pit their wits. If Zeno or Chrysippus be asked who is the wise man, he will reply that it is the man whom he himself has described. But Epicurus or some other adversary will deny this and maintain that his own representative, rather, is the wise man. The fight is on! Zeno shouts, and the whole Porch is in uproar: man was born for nothing else but virtue; she draws souls to herself merely by her grandeur, without resorting to the bait of any external advantage and, as it were, of a pandering reward; the pleasure vaunted by Epicurus is a thing received in common by beasts and by them alone; to pitch out man—and the wise man!—into such company is abominable.
But over against this, Epicurus, like another Bacchus, calling from his Gardens a horde to aid him, who, though drunk, yet look for someone whom in their Bacchic frenzy, they can tear to pieces with their Jong nails and savage fangs, and exploiting the popular approval of pleasure and an easy-going and quiet life, maintains passionately that without pleasure nobody could appear to be happy.
Should an Academic chance upon their quarrel, he will listen to each side as it attempts to win him over to itself. But if he joins one side or the other, he will be shouted down by the side he is leaving in the lurch, as crazy, ignorant, and reckless. Accordingly, when he has given an atten-