Academica

Reading notes

• Ad Atticum 13.13 §1 converted it from two books into four

  Cicero is describing the second edition of his Academica (the so-called Academica Posteriora), expanded from a two-book to a four-book form with Varro as a speaker. Only fragments of this version survive.

• Ad Atticum 13.16 §1 That entire Academic composition

  The Academica, Cicero's dialogue on the theory of knowledge and the skeptical Academy. He is recasting it: reassigning the speaking parts from one set of figures to another, and finally dedicating it to Varro.

• Ad Atticum 13.19 §3 the whole Academic inquiry in four books

  The recast Academica in four books, with Varro now arguing the dogmatic Antiochean case and Cicero replying for the skeptics; the first version had been in two books with different speakers.

• Ad Atticum 16.6 §4 the same as the one in the third book of the Academica

  The Academica was Cicero's recent dialogue on the theory of knowledge; he confesses that, drawing prefaces from a kept stockpile, he had accidentally reused its preface at the head of his new work On Glory, and now sends a replacement.

• Ad Familiares 9.8 §1 four reminders

  This letter accompanied Cicero's dedication to Varro of the Academica, his dialogue on the theory of knowledge, composed in 45 BC. The 'four reminders' are the four books of the first edition (the Academici libri / Academica Posteriora), here personified as brash messengers sent to dun Varro for the literary gift he had long promised Cicero in return.

• Ad Familiares 9.8 §1 a conversation held between us at the Cuman villa, with Pomponius present

  Cicero casts the Academica as a dialogue set at his villa near Cumae, with himself, Varro and 'Pomponius' (T. Pomponius Atticus) as the speakers. The dramatic conversation is fictional, as the next sentence admits.

• Ad Familiares 9.8 §1 you know the convention of dialogues

  Cicero defends the literary licence of putting into the speakers' mouths arguments they never actually exchanged, appealing to the established convention of the philosophical dialogue (as practised by Plato and Aristotle) in which historical figures voice positions for the sake of the argument.

• On the Nature of the Gods §1.11 my four Academic books

  Cicero's Academica, his treatise defending the skeptical method of the New Academy. He refers readers there for his reasons for following that school.

• Tusculan Disputations §2.4 the four books of the \textit{Academica}

  Cicero's epistemological dialogues defending the skeptical New Academy; the original version was in four books (the Academica priora). Here he points to it as his defense of the Academic method he follows.