Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/37

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THE ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHERS.

ments, that he made a motion in the senate, that he should be ordered to depart from Rome. He died b.c. 129.

Philo of Larissa, who is often mentioned by Cicero, was his own master, having removed to Rome after the conquest of Athens by Mithridates, where he settled as a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric. He would not admit that there was any difference between the Old and New Academy, in which he differed from his pupil Antiochus. The exact time of his birth or death is not known; but he was not living when Cicero composed his Academics. (ii. 6.)

Antiochus of Ascalon has been called by some writers the founder of the Fifth Academy; he also was a teacher of Cicero during the time he studied at Athens; he had also a school at Alexandria, and another in Syria, where he died. He studied under Philo, but was so far from agreeing with him that he wrote a treatise on purpose to refute what he considered as the scepticism of the Academics. And undoubtedly the later philosophers of that school had exaggerated the teaching of Plato, that the senses were not in all cases trustworthy organs of perception, so as to infer from it a denial of the certainty of any knowledge whatever. Antiochus professed that his object was to revive the real doctrines of Plato in opposition to the modern scepticism of Carneades and Philo. He appears to have considered himself as an eclectic philosopher, combining the best parts of the doctrines of the Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic schools.

Diodorus of Tyre flourished about b.c. 110. He lived at Athens, where he succeeded Critolaus as the head of the Peripatetic school. Cicero, however, denies that he was a genuine Peripatetic, and says that his doctrine that the summum bonum consisted in a combination of virtue with the absence of pain was an attempt to reconcile the theory of the Stoics with that of the Epicureans.

Panætius was a native of Rhodes; his exact age is not known, but he was a contemporary of Scipio Æmilianus, who died b.c. 129. He went to Athens at an early age, where he is said to have been a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus, and also of Polemo Periegetes. He