Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Carneades, the son of Epicomus or Philocomus, according to Alexander in his Successions, of Cyrene. Having read carefully the books of the Stoics, and especially those of Chrysippus, he argued against them with fairness and enjoyed such success that he used to remark: “If Chrysippus had not been, I should not have been.” He was an industrious man if ever there was one, though less distinguished in physics than in ethics. Hence he used to let his hair grow long and keep his nails untrimmed through his preoccupation with study. And he gained such influence in philosophy that even the rhetoricians, having dismissed their schools, would go to him and listen to him.

​He was also very loud-voiced, so much so that the gymnasiarch sent a messenger bidding him not to shout so loudly; but he said: “Give me, then, a measure for the voice.” Whereupon the gymnasiarch, having seized the point aptly, replied; for he said: “You have your hearers as your measure.” He was terribly formidable in reproof and hard to combat in debates; and for the reasons mentioned above, he thenceforth declined dinner invitations. Once, when Mentor the Bithynian was his disciple and came to his school, since Mentor was making advances to Carneades’ concubine, as Favorinus says in his Miscellaneous History, Carneades in the midst of lecturing made a parody aimed at him:

“Hither wanders a truthful old man of the sea, resembling Mentor in both body and voice; I declare that this man is banished from this school.” And Mentor, rising up, said: “They indeed made proclamation, but the others swiftly departed.” Yet he seems to have behaved somewhat cowardly toward his end, continually saying: “The nature that put me together will also dissolve me.” And learning that Antipater had died of drinking poison, he was stirred to boldness at the prospect of release and said: “Give me some too, then.” And when they said: “What?” “Honey-wine,” he replied. And when he died, they say an eclipse of the moon occurred, the most beautiful of stars after the sun hinting, as one might say, at a sympathy.

​Apollodorus says in his Chronology that he departed from men in the fourth year of the hundred and sixty-second Olympiad, having lived eighty-five years. There are extant letters of his to Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia. His disciples wrote down the rest of his teachings; he himself left nothing behind. There is also an epigram of ours on him in the logaoedic metre: “Why dost thou wish to refute me, Carneades, why me, Muse? For ignorant is he who knows not at all how he feared to die; since even when once afflicted with a most wretched wasting sickness, he was unwilling to find release; but hearing that Antipater had died by drinking some drug,”

“‘Give me then,’ he said, ‘something to drink too.’ ‘What indeed?’ ‘What? Give me honey-wine.’ And he kept this remark very ready at hand: ‘Nature which holds me together will truly also dissolve me.’ He went down beneath the earth no less, though it was possible for him to enter Hades holding more evils as his profit.” It is also related that his eyes suffered a cataract during the night and that he was unaware of it; and he ordered his slave-boy to light a lamp. When the boy brought it in and said: “I have brought it,” “Then do you,” he replied, “read aloud.” There were many other disciples of his, but the most famous was Clitomachus, of whom we must speak. There was, however, another Carneades, an indifferent elegiac poet.