Hannibal was forced by Roman pressure to flee Carthage in secret (195). Livy’s narrative is lively and amusing. Like a Classical Greek taking refuge with a Persian satrap, he spent the rest of his life with eastern royalty. His flight was precipitated by the arrival of three Roman envoys, whose mission was to accuse Hannibal of plotting war against Rome in combination with the Seleucid king Antiochus III. He had long prepared for something like this, and left the African mainland for a nearby island, Cercina. There he found Phoenician ships and suspected they might take news of him to Carthage. So he organized a midsummer banquet, including a huge improvised sunshade or marquee made from the ships’ sails. In the morning the crews awoke with hangovers to find their ships incapacitated. He sailed for Tyre, then Daphne, a suburb of Antioch. Back at Carthage, his town house was formally demolished.

Hannibal could not go to Ptolemaic Egypt or Antigonid Macedon. That left the Seleucids. But their preference for Greco-Macedonian employees meant Hannibal would never be fully accepted: Antiochus listened to Hannibal’s advice without taking it wholeheartedly. Hannibal’s Tyrian agent Ariston, sent to Carthage in Antiochus’ interest, failed. A Roman mission to Antiochus tried to turn him against Hannibal, who reassured Antiochus by recalling his childhood oath. Rome’s decision for war is explained: cooperation in Greece between Antiochus and the Aetolians, disaffected Roman allies. Hannibal’s role, and court intrigues against him, are traced. Antiochus lost on land at Thermopylae (Greece); his fleet under Hannibal was no match for Rome’s experienced allies the Rhodians. The Romans won at Magnesia, commanded by Lucius Scipio with Publius as adviser. Publius as Salian priest was delayed, then missed the battle through illness. He too gave Antiochus (cryptic) advice. Hannibal and Scipio are compared as advisers.

In the Aristotelian ethics after Aristotle, there are two major discussions of the conditions for a worthwhile life found in a Peripatetic doxography preserved by Stobaeus and in an Academic theory of Antiochus Ascalon, heavily inspired by Peripatetic views, reported in Book 5 of Cicero’s On Ends. We see in these texts a tendency, under the influence of anti-Stoic polemic, towards a greater explicitness but also a radicalisation of some views about the life worth living that go back to Aristotle’s own ethical works. The tendency to explicitness can be exemplified by the introduction of the notion of an ‘intermediate life’, that is, a life that is not happy but still worth living. The most striking example of radicalisation is the claim that irreparably vicious humans not only do not have a life not worth living, but that they should hasten to die. The chapter also contains a discussion of an account of the value of life by Alexander Aphrodisias, which in interesting ways develops and qualifies Aristole’s view that mere living in itself is non-instrumentally valuable.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Cicero’s choice of dialogue form serves to support his preferred position of Academic Scepticism in the Academica. From the letters Cicero wrote to Atticus while composing this work, we know that he was particularly interested in the verisimilitude of the conversation presented in his text. Yet, in the dedicatory letter that accompanied this text, Cicero is at pains to point out that this conversation is, in fact, fictitious, presenting to the reader speeches that never took place. The contention of this chapter is that Cicero’s apparently paradoxical focus on both the credibility and the fictitious nature of his dialogue can be explained by the epistemological stance advocated in this text. By creating a dramatically convincing (in rhetorical terms, enargēs, or ‘evident’) account of a conversation that never took place, Cicero is providing his reader with a further counter example to the Stoic theory of the kataleptic impression, which holds that true impressions can be distinguished from false impressions by virtue of their unique enargeia (or ‘evidentness’). Consequently, then, the form of the dialogue itself serves to reinforce the Academic claim that we have access to no clear criterion of truth.