Polemo of Athens

Polemo led the Academy for some forty years, succeeding Xenocrates around 314 BCE. The story of his conversion was famous in antiquity: a dissolute and pleasure-loving youth, he is said to have burst drunk and garlanded into a lecture of Xenocrates on temperance, only to be so struck by what he heard that he reformed on the spot and gave the rest of his life to philosophy.

As head of the school he insisted that philosophy must be lived rather than merely argued — that one should train the character in deeds, not exercise the tongue in dialectical puzzles. He taught that the goal of life is to live according to nature, a formula his pupil Zeno of Citium would carry into the new philosophy of Stoicism.

Through his pupils the Academy branched in several directions: Crantor and Crates continued the Platonic line, Zeno founded the Stoa, and Arcesilaus would soon turn the school toward scepticism. Polemo thus stands at a fertile crossroads of the succession.