Antiochus, and seeing at the same time whether those ideas can be expressed with sufficient suitableness in Latin? So after this preface we all sat down looking at one another. And Varro began as follows:— Socrates appears to me, and indeed it is the universal opinion, to have been the first person who drew philosophy away from matters of an abstruse character, which had been shrouded in mystery by nature herself, and in which all the philosophers before his time had been wholly occupied, and to have diverted it to the objects of ordinary life; directing its speculations to virtues and vices, and generally to whatever was good or bad. And he thought that the heavenly bodies were either far out of the reach of our knowledge, or that, even if we became ever so intimately acquainted with them, they had no influence on living well. In nearly all his discourses, which have been reported in great variety and very fully by those who were his pupils, he argues in such a manner that he affirms nothing himself, but refutes the assertions of others. He says that he knows nothing, except that one fact, that he is ignorant; and that he is superior to others in this particular, that they believe that they do know what they do not, while he knows this one thing alone, that he knows nothing. And it is on that account that he imagines he was pronounced by Apollo the wisest of all men, because this alone is the whole of wisdom, for a man not to think that he knows what he does not know. And as he was always saying this, and persisting in the maintenance of this opinion, his discourse was entirely devoted to the praise of virtue, and to encouraging all men to the study of virtue; as may be plainly seen in the books of the disciples of Socrates, and above all in those of Plato. But by the influence of Plato, a man of vast and varied and eloquent genius, a system of philosophy was established which was one and identical, though under two names; the system namely of the Academics and Peripatetics. For these two schools agreed in reality, and differed only in name. For when Plato had left Speusippus, his sister’s son, the inheritor as it were of his philosophy, and also two pupils most eminent for industry and genius, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, and Aristotle the Stagirite; those who adhered to Aristotle were called Peripatetics, because they disputed while walking(9) in the Lyceum. And the others, who according to the fashion of Plato himself were accustomed to hold their meetings and discussions in the Academy, which is a second Gymnasium, took their name from the place where they used to meet. But both these schools, being impregnated with the copiousness of Plato, arranged a certain definite system of doctrine, which was itself copious and luxuriant; but abandoned the Socratic plan of doubting on every subject, and of discussing everything without ever venturing on the assertion of a positive opinion. And thus there arose