Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. 1. It is of the utmost importance clearly to understand that Cicero, in his philosophical works, never professed to perform any other function but that of an interpreter to Roman readers of the Greek systems with which he deals. He did not even leave himself free to expound the systems in his own manner, but usually took certain Greek writings and translated pretty closely from them. So the ‘ Academics’ consists in substance of certain passages rendered from leading Greek books which had been called forth by the Sceptical controversy. All that Cicero supplies is the framework in which the whole is set, with sundry illustrations drawn from Roman history, which are scattered here and there throughout the discussion. 2. A somewhat low estimate has hitherto prevailed of Cicero’s trustworthiness as an expositor of Greek doctrine. I do not hesitate to say that he has had great injustice done to him in this matter. When modern scholars have found in Cicero a philosophical statement hard to understand or patently absurd, they have usually assumed, without more ado, that he has failed to catch the meaning of the author from whom he copied. It is far safer to suppose in such cases that the difficulty existed in the original source from which he drew his information. In the majority of instances this can be distinctly proved by a comparison of Cicero’s statements with those of the other ancient authorities from whom our knowledge of the Greek thinkers is derived. Cicero’s very want of originality has led him to preserve all the defects of the writers whom he translated; and the post-Aristotelian philosophers abounded in illogicalities and inconsistencies which to a modern reader seem very superficial indeed. 3. The form in which the discussions are cast by Cic…