 Roman fascination with Greek philosophy was catalyzed by the Athenian embassy of three leading philosophers sent to Rome to plead the legal case of their city in 156/155  BCE;[12]  it continued as late as the early sixth century CE, as seen especially in the life of the eminent philosophical polymath and Roman senator under barbarian rule, Boethius. Roman aristocrats were especially attracted to the Stoic willingness to countenance the kingly and political lives alongside the scholarly one as equally preferable (SVF 3.686, translated in LS 67W). They began to study the Stoa seriously from the late second century BCE. The affinity between Stoicism and Roman republicanism was enhanced by the second-century Stoic teacher Panaetius, who seems to have argued that the Roman mos maiorum or ancient ways and customs were the best form of government, so burnishing philosophical principle with the ancestral piety dear to the Romans. To be sure, in the later throes of civil war, many Stoics would have difficulty in justifying assassination of tyrants, insofar as civil war would be worse than even a monarchy flouting the law, as one Roman adherent to the school would say in rebuffing Junius Brutus’ attempt to recruit him to the conspiracy to murder Caesar (Plut. Brut. 12. 3–4). Other Romans were strongly attracted to Epicureanism or to Cynicism, and some of these, however paradoxically, likewise played significant roles in political life. Thus the distinctive lineaments of the Roman republic, now to be described, were debated and interpreted by the philosophically minded in terms of Greek political theory.