 Our knowledge of Philo’s work in ethics comes almost entirely from an extended summary of an introductory book or lecture preserved without any context in an anthology (Stobaeus Anthology 2.7). The summary is puzzling because it presents a picture of Philonian ethics that seems too dogmatic, and too ordinary, for an Academic, even at the time of the Roman Books. The work presents a method for teaching ethics in terms of an analogy between philosophy and medicine. This yields a division of ethical teaching into three parts: a protreptic stage (showing the need for philosophical guidance), a therapeutic stage (adjusting the student’s evaluative concepts), and a preservative stage (outlining the life-styles and political arrangements that promote or maintain happiness by reinforcing these adjusted concepts). This is intriguing as an example of the way in which late Hellenistic philosophers approached the teaching of practical ethics (see Annas 1993: 95–96. But it does not look innovative. The analogy between medicine and philosophy is a standard one in Plato and in Hellenistic ethics. The focus on practical rules and the application of technical divisions and sub-divisions is derived from the Stoic tradition. And its theoretical claims—for instance, that wisdom or knowledge is necessary for virtue, and that virtue promotes the goal of happiness—do not identify it as an exception to the mainstream tradition of weaker or stronger “intellectualist” and “eudaemonist” virtue ethics. In these respects, the summary suggests that Philo’s ethics was largely unaffected by the wide-ranging and penetrating criticisms of Hellenistic ethics by his Academic predecessors, and especially by Carneades (examined in Algra 1997).