rote the _Academica_ he was charged with constituting himself the champion
of an exploded and discredited school[96].

Cicero's ethics, then, stand quite apart from his dialectic. In the sphere
of morals he felt the danger of the principle of doubt. Even in the _De
Legibus_ when the dialogue turns on a moral question, he begs the New
Academy, which has introduced confusion into these subjects, to be
silent[97]. Again, Antiochus, who in the dialectical dialogue is rejected,
is in the _De Legibus_ spoken of with considerable favour[98]. All ethical
systems which seemed to afford stability to moral principles had an
attraction for Cicero. He was fascinated by the Stoics almost beyond the
power of resistance. In respect of their ethical and religious ideas he
calls them "great and famous philosophers[99]," and he frequently speaks
with something like shame of the treatment they had received at the hands
of Arcesilas and Carneades. Once he gives expression to a fear lest they
should be the only true philosophers after all[100]. There was a kind of
magnificence about the Stoic utterances on morality, more suited to a
superhuman than a human world, which allured Cicero more than the
barrenness of the Stoic dialectic repelled him[101]. On moral questions,
therefore, we often find him going farther in the direction of Stoicism
than even his teacher Antiochus. One great question which divided the
philosophers of the time was, whether happiness was capable of degrees. The
Stoics maintained that it was not, and in a remarkable passage Cicero
agrees with them, explicitly rejecting the position of Antiochus, that a
life enriched by virtue, but unattended by other advantages, might be
happy, but could not be the happiest possible[102]. He begs the Academic
and Peripatetic schools to cease from giving an uncertain sound (balbutire)
and to allow that the happiness of the wise man would remain unimpaired
even if he were thrust into the bull of Phalaris[103]. In another place he
admits the purely Stoic doctrine that virtue is one and indivisible[104].
These opinions, however, he will not allow to be distinctively Stoic, but
appeals to Socrates as his authority for them[105]. Zeno, who is merely an
ignoble craftsman of words, stole them from the Old Academy. This is
Cicero's general feeling with regard to Zeno, and there can be no doubt
that he caught it from Antiochus who, in stealing the doctrines of Zeno,
ever stoutly maintained that Zeno