lay. One might believe Lucullus thought his money really captive and barbarian, so wantonly and contumeliously did he treat it.
His furnishing a library, however, deserves praise and record, for he collected very many and choice manuscripts; and the use they were put to was even more magnificent than the purchase, the library being always open, and the walks and reading-rooms about it free to all Greeks, whose delight it was to leave their other occupations and hasten thither as to the habitation of the Muses, there walking about, and diverting one another. He himself often passed his hours there, disputing with the learned in the walks, and giving his advice to statesmen who required it, insomuch that his house was altogether a home, and in a manner a Greek prytaneum for those that visited Rome. He was fond of all sorts of philosophy, and was well-read and expert in them all. But he always from the first specially favored and valued the Academy; not the New one, which at that time under Philo flourished with the precepts of Carneades, but the Old one, then sustained and represented by Antiochus of Ascalon, a learned and eloquent man. Lucullus with great labor made him his friend and companion, and set him up against Philo's auditors, among whom Cicero was one, who wrote an admirable treatise in defence of his sect, in which he puts the argument in favor of comprehension[1] in the mouth of Lucullus, and the opposite argument in his own. The book is called Lucullus. For as has been said, they were great friends, and took the same
- ↑ Comprehensio is Cicero's literal Latin version of the Greek philosophical term catalepsis, equivalent in the doctrine of Antiochus and of the Stoics to what we might rather call apprehension, as opposed to mere sensation, or impression. The argument, placed in the mouth of Lucullus, in the book which bears his name, the second of the Prior Academics, is in favor of the possibility of certain and real knowledge, in opposition to the sceptical views of human capacities.
