12. This forms part of Varro’s answer to
Cicero, which corresponded in substance to Lucullus’
speech in the Academica Priora The drift of
this extract was most likely this: just as there
is a limit beyond which the battle against criminals
cannot be maintained, so after a certain point we
must cease to fight against perverse sceptics and let
them take their own way. See another view in
Krische, p. 62.
13. Krische believes that this fragment formed
part of an attempt to show that the senses were trustworthy,
in the course of which the clearness with which the
fishes were seen leaping from the water was brought
up as evidence. (In Luc. 81, on the other hand,
Cic. drew an argument hostile to the senses from the
consideration of the fish.) The explanation seems to
me very improbable. The words bear such a striking
resemblance to those in Luc. 125 (ut nos
nunc simus ad Baulos Puteolosque videmus, sic innumerabilis
paribus in locis esse isdem de rebus disputantis)
that I am inclined to think that the reference in
Nonius ought to be to Book IV. and not Book III.,
and that Cic., when he changed the scene from Bauli
to the Lucrine lake, also changed Puteolosque
into pisciculosque exultantes for the sufficient
reason that Puteoli was not visible from Varro’s
villa on the Lucrine.
14. The passion for knowledge in the human heart
was doubtless used by Varro as an argument in favour
of assuming absolute knowledge to be attainable.
The same line is taken in Luc. 31, D.F.
III. 17, and elsewhere.
15. It is so much easier to find parallels to
this in Cicero’s speech than in that of Lucullus
in the Academica Priora that I think the reference
in Nonius must be wrong. The talk about freedom
suits a sceptic better than a dogmatist (see Luc.
105, 120, and Cic.’s words in 8 of the same).
If my conjecture is right this fragment belongs to
Book IV. Krische gives a different opinion, but
very hesitatingly, p. 63.
16. This may well have formed part of Varro’s
explanation of the [Greek: katalepsis], temeritas
being as much deprecated by the Antiocheans and Stoics
as by the Academics cf. I. 42.
17. I conjecture malleo (a hammer) for
the corrupt malcho, and think that in the second
ed. some comparison from building operations to illustrate
the fixity of knowledge gained through the [Greek:
katalepseis] was added to a passage which would correspond
in substance with 27 of the Lucullus.
I note in Vitruvius, quoted by Forc. s.v. malleolus,
a similar expression (naves malleolis confixae)
and in Pliny Nat. Hist. XXXIV. 14 navis
fixa malleo. Adfixa therefore in this passage
must have agreed with some lost noun either in the
neut. plur. or fem. sing.
18. This and fragm. 19 evidently hang very closely
together. As Krische notes, the Stoic [Greek:
enargeia] had evidently been translated earlier in
the book by perspicuitas as in Luc. 17.
