ce of a study of philosophy to serve as a
corrective for the somewhat narrow rhetorical discipline of the time.[2]

Cicero's first systematic lessons in philosophy were given him by the
Epicurean Phaedrus, then at Rome because of the unsettled state of Athens,
whose lectures he attended at a very early age, even before he had assumed
the toga virilis. The pupil seems to have been converted at once to the
tenets of the master.[3] Phaedrus remained to the end of his life a friend
of Cicero, who speaks warmly in praise of his teacher's amiable disposition
and refined style. He is the only Epicurean, with, perhaps, the exception
of Lucretius, whom the orator ever allows to possess any literary power.[4]
Cicero soon abandoned Epicureanism, but his schoolfellow, T. Pomponius
Atticus, received more lasting impressions from the teaching of Phaedrus.
It was probably at this period of their lives that Atticus and his friend
became acquainted with Patro, who succeeded Zeno of Sidon as head of the
Epicurean school.[5]

At this time (i.e. before 88 B.C.) Cicero also heard the lectures of
Diodotus the Stoic, with whom he studied chiefly, though not exclusively,
the art of dialectic.[6] This art, which Cicero deems so important to the
orator that he calls it "abbreviated eloquence," was then the monopoly of
the Stoic school. For some time Cicero spent all his days with Diodotus in
the severest study, but he seems never to have been much attracted by the
general Stoic teaching. Still, the friendship between the two lasted till
the death of Diodotus, who, according to a fashion set by the Roman Stoic
circle of the time of Scipio and Laelius, became an inmate of Cicero's
house, where he died in B.C. 59, leaving his pupil heir to a not
inconsiderable property.[7] He seems to have been one of the most
accomplished men of his time, and Cicero's feelings towards him were those
of gratitude, esteem, and admiration.[8]

In the year 88 B.C. the celebrated Philo of Larissa, then head of the
Academic school, came to Rome, one of a number of eminent Greeks who fled
from Athens on the approach of its siege during the Mithridatic war. Philo,
like Diodotus, was a man of versatile genius: unlike the Stoic philosopher,
he was a perfect master both of the theory and the practice of oratory.
Cicero had scarcely heard him before all inclination for Epicureanism was
swept from his mind, and he surrendered himself wholly, as he tells us, to
the brilliant A