 Whether or not Cicero is fair to the detail of Stoic and Epicurean ethics, his aim, as exemplified by the dialogical structure, is to provoke debate. In particular, his readers are invited to consider to what extent ethical theory must be answerable to social reality. Is not an ethical theory that cannot be lived consistently thereby flawed as a theory? In keeping with this question, Cicero moves next to a theory that seems on the face of it rather more congenial to lived experience, with an exposition by his interlocutor Piso of the ethics of the Old Academy, broadly in line with what we now think of as Aristotelian ethics.