When, however, we come to examine both the men and their arguments, we somehow do not find their assault upon astrology especially impressive or satisfactory. First, as to the men. Gellius says that he heard Favorinus make the speech the substance of which he repeats, but that he is unable to state whether the philosopher really meant what he said or argued merely in order to exercise and to display his genius.[195] There was reason for this perplexity of Gellius, since Favorinus was fond of writing such essays as Eulogies of Thersites and of Quartan Fever. There is no particular reason for doubting Sextus’s seriousness, but, besides being a medical man, he was a member of the sceptical school of philosophy, a circumstance which warns one not to attribute too much emphasis to his attack on astrology. Indeed, the attack occurs in a work directed against learning in general, in which he assails grammarians, rhetoricians, geometricians, arithmeticians, students of music, logicians, “physicists,” and students of ethics as well as astrologers. Cicero was not prone to such sweeping scepticism or sophistry, but the force of his opposition to astrology is somewhat neutralized by the fact that in his _Dream of Scipio_ he apparently attributes to planets influence over man. Now as to their arguments. We have spoken of their “attack on astrology,” but in reality they can scarcely be said to attack astrology as a whole. Indeed, it is the doctrines of the Chaldeans which Cicero makes the object of his assault; he says nothing about astrology. Favorinus will not even admit that he attacks the “disciplina Chaldaeorum” in any true sense, but affirms that the Chaldeans were not the authors of such theories at all, but that these have originated of late among traveling fakirs who beg their bread by means of such deceits and trickeries.[196] Some of the arguments of our sceptics are really directed merely against the methods of interpreting the decrees of the stars which they give us to understand that the astrologers employ. Such objections might suffice to pierce the presumption of the ordinary popular astrologer but they fall back blunted from the system of Ptolemy.[197] If our sceptics thought that they were overthrowing the astrology of the man of learning by such arguments, they labored under a misapprehension, and in the eyes of one who really understood the art must have cut the figure of ignoramuses making false charges against a science of which they knew next to nothing.