 Born in Cyrene, then a Greek-speaking city on the Mediteranean coast of North Africa, Carneades pursued his philosophical studies in Athens, which was then as it had been and was to be for some time the philosophical center of the ancient world. There he studied not only at the Academy, the school founded by Plato of which he was to become the leader or scholarch, but also with with Diogenes of Babylon, the fifth scholarch of the Stoic school and a pupil of Chrysippus (c. 208–206 BCE). Chrysippus was the principal architect of the Stoic system and the most important philosophical stimulus to Carneades, who is reported to have said, ‘If Chrysippus had not been, I would not have been’ (D.L. 4.62) (which echoes the saying, ‘If Chrysippus had not been, there would have been no Stoa’). Carneades became scholarch of the Academy sometime before 155 BCE, when, together with Diogenes and Critolaus, the head of Aristotle’s school, the Peripatos, he was sent to Rome to represent Athens in a petition before the senate (see Powell, 2013).