 On the basis of a number of slender indications, Timon’s date of birth is generally set at around 325–320 BCE and his date of death at around 235–230 BCE. For the details of his life we are wholly dependent on the brief account in Diogenes Laertius (9.109–115) (see the entry on  doxography of ancient philosophy);  Diogenes wrote perhaps in the early to mid-third century CE, but his account claims to be drawn from several earlier sources. According to Diogenes, Timon initially studied (after an early career as a dancer in his home town of Phlius, an inland city of the Peloponnese not far from the gulf of Corinth) with Stilpo of Megara. After an interval in which he returned home and married, he then went to Elis, in the northwest corner of the Peloponnese, to study with Pyrrho. Diogenes makes it sound as if his stay at Elis was relatively brief; he says that it lasted until Timon had children (9.109), and that at that point he was compelled to go elsewhere to make money as a sophist, or paid teacher of philosophical and other theory to late adolescent young men. But whatever the length of his association with Pyrrho, Timon became an adherent of Pyrrho’s philosophy from then on. His activities as a sophist (whatever exactly these involved) appear to have left him financially secure; we are told that he then went to Athens and lived there (except for a short stay at Thebes) until his death. Diogenes names two kings with whom he was acquainted, and several poets with whom he collaborated; it is difficult to know what to make of this information, although the work of Clayman (2009) has shown, by means of detailed parallels with contemporary poetry, that he was deeply immersed in the poetic world of his time. During his time at Athens—probably several decades—he is likely also to have made the acquaintance of the leading philosophers of the time; Diogenes includes anecdotes featuring him making fun of  Arcesilaus,  who was head of the Academy during most or all of this time, but he no doubt encountered Stoics and Epicureans as well. That no representatives of any of these schools refer to him in any surviving records is perhaps not surprising, given the scathing critiques that are implicit in his portraits of them in the Silloi.