a celebrated philosopher, and the founder of the Third or New Academy at Athens, was born at Cyrene in Africa, about B.C. 213. He was a strenuous opponent of the Stoics, and applied himself with great zeal to refute the works of Chrysippus, one of the most eminent philosophers of their sect. In B.C. 155 Carneades, accompanied by Diogenes and Critolaus, was sent on an embassy to Rome, to deprecate a fine of 500 talents which had been imposed on the Athenians for plundering the city of Oropus. Before obtaining an audience of the senate, these philosophers harangued the people in various parts of the city, and drew together great multitudes by their eloquence. The Athenian ambassadors, said many of the senators, "were sent rather to force us to comply with their demands, than to solicit them by persuasion;" meaning that it was impossible to resist the powerful eloquence of Carneades. His subtlety in argument was most conspicuously displayed in his two orations on justice. The first of these was in commendation of the virtue; and the second, which he delivered on the following day, was a refutation of the first, and showed that justice was but a mere matter of compact for the maintenance of civil society. This grieved the honest mind of Cato, who urged the senate to send Carneades back to Athens lest the Roman youth should be corrupted by his pernicious doctrines. Such indeed, according to Plutarch, was the enthusiasm excited by his discourses, that the young Romans were carried away with a kind of mania for philosophizing, and forsook their usual pursuits. Paradox was the element of Carneades: he delighted in demolishing his own work, because it served in the end to confirm his grand principle—that there are only probabilities or resemblances of truth in the mind of man; so that of two things directly opposite, either may be chosen indifferently. Quintilian remarks, that although Carneades might argue in favour of injustice, yet he was invariably actuated by the strictest sense of honour. He died in B.C. 129, at the age of 85. (See Diog. Laert. iv.)