The short-lived 'Old Academy' of Antiochus of Ascalon is a movement, which arose after Sulla's siege of Athens in 86 BC and the subsequent closure of the Athenian philosophical schools. A product of the lack of institutional unity and the decentralisation of philosophical activity during the First century BC, it is a sign of the contested nature of the Academic identity during this era. After examining Antiochus' construction of a unitary Academy, I will trace the roots of his stance in the Hellenistic Peripatetic tradition.
Georgia Tsouni is an Assistant Professor at the Chair of History of Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is a graduate of Athens and Humboldt University (Classics and Philosophy) and received her PhD (2010) at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. David Sedley on Peripatetic ethics in the First century BC. During 2011-2012 she was a Post-doc Fellow at CEU’s Department of Philosophy.