Antiochus (c.130–68 BC)

For most of his career the Greek philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, a pupil of Philo of Larissa, was an orthodox ‘sceptical’ Academic. He then changed his philosophy: some called him a Stoic, but he himself claimed to be returning to the Old Academy of Plato and his immediate successors. He took a generous view of his new home, urging that the Peripatetics and the Stoics were not new schools of thought but mere modifications of Platonism, and the philosophical position which he advocated was a ‘syncretism’ – an amalgam of ideas and doctrines and arguments taken from several sources. To philosophy itself he contributed little, but he was a figure of considerable importance in the larger world, where he presented Greek philosophy to an educated Roman public.