It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213-129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic--a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods. For the arguments of Carneades against the Stoic doctrine of immortality see Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii, 12, 17; and for his argument against theism see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix, 172, 183. Mr. Benn pronounces this criticism of theology "the most destructive that has ever appeared, the armoury whence religious skepticism ever since has been supplied" (The Philosophy of Greece, etc., p. 258). This seems an over-statement. But it is just to say, as does Mr. Whittaker (Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911, p. 60; cp. p. 86), that "there has never been a more drastic attack than that of Carneades, which furnished Cicero with the materials for his second book, On Divination"; and, as does Prof. Martha (Études Morales sur l'antiquité, 1889, p. 77), that no philosophic or religious school has been able to ignore the problems which Carneades raised. As against the essentially uncritical Stoics, the criticism of Carneades is sane and sound; and he has been termed by judicious moderns "the greatest skeptical mind of antiquity" [733] and "the Bayle of Antiquity"; [734] though he seems to have written nothing. [735] There is such a concurrence of testimony as to the victorious power of his oratory and the invincible skill of his dialectic [736] that he must be reckoned one of the great intellectual and rationalizing forces of his day, triumphing as he did in the two diverse arenas of Greece and Rome. His disciple and successor Clitomachos said of him, with Cicero's assent, that he had achieved a labour of Hercules "in liberating our souls as it were of a fierce monster, credulity, conjecture, rash belief." [737] He was, in short, a mighty antagonist of thoughtless beliefs, clearing the ground for a rational life; and the fact that he was chosen with Diogenes the Peripatetic and Critolaos the Stoic to go to Rome to plead the cause of ruined Athens, mulcted in an enormous fine, proved that he was held in high honour at home. Athens, in short, was not at this stage "too superstitious." Unreasoning faith was largely discredited by philosophy.