United States or Qatar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And he therefore is the greatest statesman who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed to the individual whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash adventure! The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as the self-communings of Mazzini. The unity of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet distinct from the unity of those parts.
In his stern but narrow patriotism, he looked with jealous eyes on all that might turn the citizens from a single-minded devotion to the State. Culture was connected in his mind with Greece, and her deleterious influence. The embassy of Diogenes, Critolaus, and Carneades, 155 B.C. had shown him to what uses culture might be turned.
In this state of mind he was drawn to the doctrines of the New Academy, or, as Augustine in his "Confessions" calls them, the Academics, whose representatives, Arcesilaus and Carneades, also made great pretensions, but denied the possibility of arriving at absolute truth, aiming only at probability. However lofty the speculations of these philosophers, they were sceptical in their tendency.
And as you seem desirous of knowing how it is that, notwithstanding the different opinions of philosophers with regard to the ends of goods, virtue has still sufficient security for the effecting of a happy life which security, as we are informed, Carneades used indeed to dispute against; but he disputed as against the Stoics, whose opinions he combated with great zeal and vehemence.
V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus, IV. II. The Domain Question Viewed in Itself, IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration IV. XII. Carneades at Rome, V. III. Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution IV. X. The Roman Municipal System Of both laws considerable fragments still exist. V. XI. Diminution of the Proletariate
But there are some who think that this is spoken against Antipater, and not against the whole sect; for that he, being pressed by Carneades, fell into these fooleries. But as for those things that are against the common conceptions taught in the Stoa concerning love, they are all of them concerned in the absurdity.
See a striking passage from Cicero's Academics, preserved by Augustine, contra Acad. iii. 7, and Lucullus, 18. De Nat. Deor. passim; de Div. ii. 72. "Quorum controversiam solebat tanquam honorarius arbiter judicare Carneades." Tusc. Quæst. v. 41. De Fin. ii. 1; de Orat. i. 18; Lucullus, 3; Tusc. Quæst. v. 11; Numen. apud Euseb. Præp. Evang. xiv. 6, etc. Lactantius, Inst. iii. 4. De Nat.
You lie down with him looking out upon the sea at Comæ, or sit with him beneath the plane-tree of Crassus, and listen while he tells you of this doctrine and the other. So Arcesilas may be supposed to have said, and so Carneades laid down the law. It was that and no more. But when he tells you of the place assigned to you in heaven, and how you are to win it, then he is in earnest.
He was now grown old, when Carneades the Academic, and Diogenes the Stoic, came as deputies from Athens to Rome, praying for release from a penalty of five hundred talents laid on the Athenians, in a suit, to which they did not appear, in which the Oropians were plaintiffs, and Sicyonians judges.
We have already observed that Cicero in early life inclined to the doctrines of Plato and Antiochus, which, at the time he composed the bulk of his writings, he had abandoned for those of Carneades and Philo. Yet he was never so entirely a disciple of the New Academy as to neglect the claims of morality and the laws.
Word Of The Day