are inclined to withhold their praise from everything but what they are
persuaded they can attain to themselves, and who limit their ideas of
good speaking by the hopes which they conceive of what they themselves
may attain to, and who declare, when they are overwhelmed with a flow
of words and sentences, that they prefer the utmost poverty of thought
and expression to that plenty and copiousness (from which arose the
Attic kind of oratory, which they who professed it were strangers to,
though they have now been some time silenced, and laughed out of the
very courts of justice), what may I not expect, when at present I
cannot have the least countenance from the people by whom I used to be
upheld before? For philosophy is satisfied with a few judges, and of
her own accord industriously avoids the multitude, who are jealous of
it, and utterly displeased with it; so that, should any one undertake
to cry down the whole of it, he would have the people on his side;
while, if he should attack that school which I particularly profess, he
would have great assistance from those of the other philosophers.

II. But I have answered the detractors of philosophy in general, in my
Hortensius. And what I had to say in favor of the Academics, is, I
think, explained with sufficient accuracy in my four books of the
Academic Question.

But yet I am so far from desiring that no one should write against me,
that it is what I most earnestly wish; for philosophy would never have
been in such esteem in Greece itself, if it had not been for the
strength which it acquired from the contentions and disputations of the
most learned men; and therefore I recommend all men who have abilities
to follow my advice to snatch this art also from declining Greece, and
to transport it to this city; as our ancestors by their study and
industry have imported all their other arts which were worth having.