"They are all concealed, these things--hidden in thick darkness, so that no human eye can have power enough to look up into the heavens or down on to the earth. We do not know our own bodies, or the nature or strength of their component parts. The doctors themselves, who have opened them and looked at them, are ignorant. The Empirics declare that they know nothing; because, as soon as looked at, they may change. * * * Hicetas, the Syracusan, as Theophrastus tells us, thinks that the heavens and the sun and the moon and the stars all stand still, and that nothing in all the world moves but the earth. Now what do you, followers of Epicurus, say to this?"[280] I need not carry the conversation on any farther to show that Cicero is ridiculing the whole thing. This Hicetas, the Syracusan, seems to have been nearer the mark than the others, according to the existing lights, which had not shone out as yet in Cicero's days. "But what was the meaning of it all? Who knows anything about it? How is a man to live by listening to such trash as this?" It is thus that Cicero means to be understood. I will agree that Cicero does not often speak out so clearly as he does here, turning the whole thing into ridicule. He does generally find it well to say something in praise of these philosophers. He does not quite declare the fact that nothing is to be made of them; or, rather, there is existing in it all an under feeling that, were he to do so, he would destroy his character and rob himself of his amusement. But we remember always his character of a philosopher, as attributed to Cato, in his speech during his Consulship for Murena. I have told the story when giving an account of the speech. "He who cuts the throat of an old cock when there is no need, has sinned as deeply as the parricide when breaking his father's neck,"[281] says Cicero, laughing at the Stoics. There he speaks out the feelings of his heart--there, and often elsewhere in his orations. Here, in his Academica, he is eloquent on the same side. We cannot but rejoice at the plainness of his words; but it has to be acknowledged that we do not often find him so loudly betraying himself when dealing with the old discussions of the Greek philosophers.