Cicero's Academici libri and Lucullus

Book excerpt: Cicero's so-called Academica is a significant text for European cultural and intellectual history: as a substantial and self-contained body of evidence for one of the two varieties of scepticism in antiquity, as evidence for Stoic thought presented on its own terms and in interaction with objections, as a key text in a broader tradition which is devoted to the possibility of knowledge arising from perceptual experience, and as evidence for the fate of Plato's Academy in its final phase as a functioning school. This volume is the first detailed commentary on this set of texts since Reid's, published in 1885. It takes full account of the scholarly debate to date and seeks to elucidate the dialogues and fragmentary remains from a philosophical, historical, literary, and linguistic point of view.