ABSTRACT
Antiochus’s secession and the death of Philo mark the end of the sceptical Academy as a functioning school of philosophy. Academic Scepticism gave place to revived Aenesidemean Pyrrhonism; and the early imperial period saw the beginnings of the syncretizing dogmatism characteristic of Middle Platonism. However if the Academy itself ceased to function as a sceptical institution (indeed as an institution altogether),1 Academic Scepticism did not entirely die. We know of one Eudorus teaching in Alexandria in the third quarter of the first century BC,2 whom Plutarch (On the Generation of the Soul in ‘Timaeus’ 1013b) paints as a Platonist relying on a criterion of the ‘likely’ (to eikos) fathered upon the Plato of the Timaeus (29b-d: cf. Chapter V, 84). Eudorus does not seem to be himself an Academic (in the sceptical sense: ‘Academic’ now means ‘Academic Sceptic’)—Tarrant (1985, 5) traces the origins of the Middle Platonist concentration on metaphysics and cosmology to him.
