ABSTRACT
Of Clitomachus we know little (how much depends on the extent to which he lies behind Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions and On Stoic Self-Contradictions; see Chapter VIII, 140). He wrote voluminously on Carneades, but still was unable to decide what if anything he had believed (Acad. 2 139; Chapter VI, 94); however, that admission occurs in the discussion of the telos, or end, and may well have been restricted to that context. He ran the Academy from 129 BC until about 110, when he was succeeded by Philo of Larissa (c. 160-c. 83 BC), who led the school until his own death. Philo was Cicero’s teacher, and it is to Cicero that we owe the bulk of our knowledge of Academic scepticism. The evidence for his and Metrodorus of Stratonicea’s1 divergence from the Clitomachean account of Carneades comes from Cicero (Acad. 2 78: the interpretative dispute centres around Carneades’ claim that, in the absence of katalēpsis, the Sage may opine). Sextus credits Philo with founding the ‘Fourth Academy’ (PH 1 220), which implies some new departures on his part; and Cicero explicitly describes him as an innovator (Acad. 2 18).2 Numenius (in Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 14 9 2) attributes Philo’s apostasy from the New Academic orthodoxy to ‘his conversion by the clear evidence (enargeia) of his own experiences’.3
