But it is not too much to say that the whole spirit of later antiquity, so far as it interested itself in the discovery of truth, from the time that Greek philosophy was diffused over the Roman world, leant more or less to eclecticism. Its most able, most distinguished, and most interesting representative is Cicero.(444) He lived at a time when rival criticism had searched out and exposed every weak point in the different systems of thought. To found new systems there was no further creative force; his eclectic position was the necessary result. His genius supplied him with no means to overcome it. His philosophical writings are scarcely more than transcripts from various Grecian sources, wherein he uses his skill as a rhetorician and his unfailing wealth of words to set forth with lawyerlike balancing the arguments of different schools. We can yet detect the originals, from which in the short intervals of enforced absence from political life before and after the death of Cæsar he transfused with such rapidity into a Latin shape the products of Greek discussion.(445) Thus his treatise on the Republic and on Laws are in form imitations of Plato’s writings with the same title, while for their contents Cicero applies Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines to his own political experiences, making also much use of Polybius. His _Paradoxa_ explain Stoic propositions. The groundwork of his _Consolatio_ is Crantor’s writing upon Grief. The _Lost Hortensius_ is drawn from an exhortation of Aristotle to Themison, a prince of a city of Cyprus, or from a similar work of the academician Philo of Larissa; his books _De Finibus_ from works of Phædrus, Chrysippus, Carneades, Antiochus, as well as the studies which Cicero himself in his youth made while attending lectures; his _Academica_ from the writings and partly also from the lectures of the best-known Academicians: his _Tusculan Disputations_ from Plato and Crantor, from Stoics and Peripatetics. The first book on the _Nature of the Gods_ from the writing of an Epicurean, which has been discovered in the rolls of Herculaneum, and was first supposed to be a treatise of Phædrus, but is now known to be a work of Philodemus: his critique on the Epicurean standing-point is drawn from the stoic Posidonius; the second book from Cleanthes and Chrysippus; the third from Carneades and Clitomachus. Of his books on _Divination_, the first is taken from Chrysippus, Posidonius, Diogenes, and Antipater; the second from Carneades, and the stoic Panætius. His treatise on _Fate_ from the writings of Chrysippus, Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Carneades: his _Elder Cato_ from Plato, Xenophon, Hippocrates, and Aristo of Chius: his _Lælius_ mainly from a writing of Theophrastus on Friendship. His main authority for the first two books on _Offices_ is Panætius; and for the third Posidonius; while besides Plato and Aristotle he has made use of Diogenes of Babylon, Antipater of Tyre, and Hecato.