  Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110–ca. 30 BCE) was an Epicurean philosopher and epigrammatist who, having studied in the Epicurean school at Athens when it was led by Zeno of Sidon (c. 150–c. 75 BCE), moved to Italy, probably in the 70s BCE. There he may have lived in the Greek town of Naples, and perhaps also in Rome. Some of Philodemus’ poems, which were praised by Cicero, were preserved in the Palatine Anthology, and these were all that was known of his writing until the discovery in the mid-18th century of a trove of papyrus manuscripts in the ruins of a grand villa in Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The majority of these were philosophical works of his.