[7]
But as to
yourself, men are wont to call you wise in a somewhat
different way, not only because of your mental endowments and natural character, but also because of
your devotion to study and because of your culture,
and they employ the term in your case, not as the
ignorant do, but as learned men employ it. And
in this sense we have understood that no one in
all Greece was “wise” except one in Athens, and
he,1 I admit, was actually adjudged “most wise”
by the oracle of Apollo—for the more captious
critics refuse to admit those who are called “The
Seven” into the category of the wise. Your
wisdom, in public estimation, consists in this: you
consider all your possessions to be within yourself
and believe human fortune of less account than
virtue. Hence the question is put to me and to
Scaevola here, too, I believe, as to how you bear
the death of Africanus, and the inquiry is the more
insistent because, on the last Nones,2 when we had
met as usual for the practice3 of our augural art
in the country home of Decimus Brutus, you were
not present, though it had been your custom always
to observe that day and to discharge its duties with
the most scrupulous care.
1 The reference is to Socrates. Cicero often quotes this oracle: infra, 2. 10; ib. 4. 13; C.M. 21. 78; Acad. i. 4. 16.
2 The Augurs regularly met in their college on the Nones (i.e. the 7th of March, May, July, and October, the 5th of other months).
3 Commentandi, i.e. practising the augural art under the open sky. Cf. Cic. N.D. ii. 11; De rep. i. 14.
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