Critolaus

Critolaus of Phaselis, who lived from about 200 BC to about 118 BC, was a Greek philosopher of the Peripatetic school, the tradition founded on the teaching of Aristotle. Born in Phaselis, a Greek colony in Lycia, he studied at Athens under Aristo of Ceos and rose to be one of the school's leaders, known as an orator, a scholar and a moralist. In 155 BC he was one of three philosophers, with Carneades and Diogenes of Babylon, whom Athens sent to Rome to win relief from a fine; their lectures drew Roman crowds and alarmed conservative statesmen such as Cato. None of his writings survive. He held that pleasure is an evil, that the soul is made of aether, and that the goal of life is the perfection of the natural life, including goods of the soul, the body and the world outside. Against the Stoics he defended the Aristotelian view that the world and the human race are eternal. His pupil Diodorus of Tyre later headed the school.