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use of pertinere in D.F. III. 55. Clitomacho: cf. n. on 59.
§§79—90. Summary You are wrong, Lucullus, in upholding your cause in spite of
my arguments yesterday against the senses. You are thus acting like the Epicureans,
who say that the inference only from the sensation can be false, not the sensation
itself (79, 80). I wish the god of whom you spoke would ask me whether I wanted
anything more than sound senses. He would have a bad time with me. For even
granting that our vision is correct how marvellously circumscribed it is! But say you,
we desire no more. No I answer, you are like the mole who desires not the light
because he is blind. Yet I would not so much reproach the god because my vision is
narrow, as because it deceives me (80, 81). If you want something greater than the
bent oar, what can be greater than the sun? Still he seems to us a foot broad, and
Epicurus thinks he may be a little broader or narrower than he seems. With all his
enormous speed, too, he appears to us to stand still (82). The whole question lies in
a nutshell; of four propositions which prove my point only one is disputed viz. that
every true sensation has side by side with it a false one indistinguishable from it
(83). A man who has mistaken P. for Q. Geminus could have no infallible mode of
recognising Cotta. You say that no such indistinguishable resemblances exist. Never
mind, they seem to exist and that is enough. One mistaken sensation will throw all
the others into uncertainty (84). You say everything belongs to its own genus this I
will not contest. I am not concerned to show that two sensations are absolutely
similar, it is enough that human faculties cannot distinguish between them. How
about the impressions of signet rings? (85) Can you find a ring merchant to rival
your chicken rearer of Delos? But, you say, art aids the senses. So we cannot see or
hear without art, which so few can have! What an idea this gives us of the art with
which nature has constructed the senses! (86) But about physics I will speak
afterwards. I am going now to advance against the senses arguments drawn from
Chrysippus himself (87). You said that the sensations of dreamers, drunkards and
madmen were feebler than those of the waking, the sober and the sane. The cases of
Ennius and his Alcmaeon, of your own relative Tuditanus, of the Hercules of
Euripides disprove your point (88, 89). In their case at least 'mind and eyes agreed. It
is no good to talk about the saner moments of such people; the question is, what was
the nature of their sensations at the time they were affected? (90)
§79. Communi loco: t?p?, that of blinking facts which cannot be disproved, see 19. Quod ne [id]:
I have bracketed id with most edd. since Manut. If, however, quod be taken as the conjunction,
and not as the pronoun, id is not altogether insupportable. Heri: cf. Introd. 55. Infracto remo: n.
on 19. Tennyson seems to allude to this in his "Higher Pantheism"—"all we have power to see is
a straight staff bent in a pool". Manent illa omnia, iacet: this is my correction of the reading of
most MSS. maneant ... lacerat. Madv. Em. 176 in combating the conj. of Goer. si maneant ...
laceratis istam causam, approves maneant ... iaceat, a reading with some MSS. support, adopted
by Orelli. I think the whole confusion of the passage arises from the mania of the copyists for
turning indicatives into subjunctives, of which in critical editions of Cic. exx. occur every few
pages. If iacet were by error turned into iaceret the reading lacerat would arise at once. The nom.
to dicit is, I may observe, not Epicurus, as Orelli takes it, but Lucullus. Trans. "all my arguments
remain untouched; your case is overthrown, yet his senses are true quotha!" (For this use of dicit
cf. inquit in 101, 109, 115). Hermann approves the odd reading of the ed. Cratandriana of 1528
latrat. Dav. conjectured comically blaterat iste tamen et, Halm lacera est ista causa. Habes: as
two good MSS. have habes et eum, Madv. Em. 176 conj. habet. The change of person, however,
(from dicit to habes) occurs also in 101. Epicurus: n. on 19.
§80. Hoc est verum esse: Madv. Em. 177 took verum as meaning fair, candid, in this explanation
I concur. Madv., however, in his critical epistle to Orelli p. 139 abandoned it and proposed virum
esse, a very strange em. Halm's conj. certum esse is weak and improbable. Importune: this is in
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