estore Carneades himself
for the purpose. This philosopher, having been sent by the
Athenians to Rome as an ambassador, discussed the subject of
justice very amply in the hearing of Galba and Cato the
Censor, who were the greatest orators of the day. And the
next day he overturned all his arguments by others of a
contrary tendency, and disparaged justice, which the day
before he had extolled; speaking not indeed with the gravity
of a philosopher whose wisdom ought to be steady, and whose
opinions unchangeable, but in a kind of rhetorical exercise
of arguing on each side--a practice which he was accustomed
to adopt, in order to be able to refute others who were
asserting anything. The arguments by which he disparaged
justice are mentioned by Lucius Furius in Cicero; I suppose,
since he was discussing the Commonwealth, in order to
introduce a defence and panegyric of that quality without
which he did not think a commonwealth could be administered.
But Carneades, in order to refute Aristotle and Plato, the
advocates of justice, collected in his first argument
everything that was in the habit of being advanced on behalf
of justice, in order afterward to be able to overturn it, as
he did.

VII. Many philosophers indeed, and especially Plato and
Aristotle, have spoken a great deal of justice, inculcating
that virtue, and extolling it with the highest praise, as
giving to every one what belongs to him, as preserving equity
in all things, and urging that while the other virtues are,
as it were, silent and shut up, justice is the only one which
is not absorbed in considerations of self-interest, and which
is not secret, but finds its whole field for exercise
out-of-doors, and is desirous of doing good and serving as
many people as possible; as if, forsooth, justice ought to
exist in judges only, and in men invested with a certain
authority, and not in every one! But there is no one, not
even a man of the lowest class, or a beggar, who is destitute
of opportunities of displaying justice. But because these
philosophers knew not what its essence was, or whence it
proceeded, or what its employment was, they attributed that
first of all virtues, which is the common good of all men, to
a few only, and asserted that it aimed at no advantage