In section XXXI, Cicero really got me thinking about the liberal arts and rhetoric because he seems to be advocating against a certain kind of specializaton.
If I'm reading him write, Cicero argues that there are all kinds of specialists out there such as "philosophers on justice, on the duties of life, on the establishment and administration of civil government, and on the whole systems of moral and even natural philosophy" (227). He continues to argue that the orator should only take from these specific disciplines what he needs and shouldn't actually spend time specializing:
nor let us...consume all our lives in this kind of learning, but, when we have discovered the fountains...let us draw from them as much as occasion may require, as often as we need" (227).
"The orator therefore has liberty to expatiate in so large and immense a field, and, wherever he stops, can stand upon his own territory, all the furniture and embellishments of eloquence readily off themselves to him" (227).
So if I'm not mistaken then, Cicero (or maybe I should leave it as Crassus) is really suggesting (1) that the world needs people who specialize in multidisciplinarity (if that makes any sense) because (2) these people make the knowledge in the disciplines usable. In other words, orators draw from specialized knowledge whenever they need to and to whatever extent they need to in order to do something in a public venue.
I could be reading into CIcero here because I'm projecting my own hopes for liberal arts, but it seems like this goes a long way toward explaining and perhaps validating the "dappled discipline" we talk about so much.
What I wonder though is whether or not Cicero, while an advocate for orators, sees them as the most important contributors to society the way engineers often consider their own work (sorry that's a stereotype meant to illustrate my point). Are orators the most important role in a culture or are they one important role among many essential roles? Can we make any kind of distinction based on Cicero's language?