Antiochus was also the friend of the Roman politician and general Lucullus, whom he accompanied on a trip to North Africa and on a campaign to Armenia.
[a] However, due to the poor state of preservation of the papyrus, a significant part of the relevant section is either lost or difficult to read.
Ambassadorial trips by Antiochus to Rome and "to the governors in the provinces" reported by Philodemus testify to the philosopher's prestige at this time, when he was at the height of his fame, and Strabo, in describing Ascalon, mentions his birth there as a mark of distinction for the city.
[11] and Cicero frequently speaks of him in affectionate and respectful terms as the best and wisest of the Academics, and the most polished and acute philosopher of his age.
[12][9] When Antiochus' friend and patron Lucullus undertook a campaign to Armenia in the year 69 in the Third Mithridatic War, he accompanied him and was present at the battle of Tigranokerta against the troops of the Armenian king Tigranes II on October 6, 69.
In addition, there are individual statements by the Pyrrhonist skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who also transmits an Antiochus fragment quoted verbatim.
Antiochus presents himself as the intellectual heir of all three traditions and makes appeals to the "ancients"; among his authorities are not only the scholars of the older academy, but also Aristotle.
However, the skepticism introduced by Arcesilaus turned away from this consensus based in truth, and the Peripatetic school had also lost their way after Aristotle in their excessive focus on natural philosophy; only the Stoics had been able to preserve any of the original authentic teachings of Platonism, the apparent differences had simply been attempts to correct some details.
In epistemology, Antiochus attacks the position of the skeptics, according to which all statements - especially all philosophical teachings - are only opinions, the correctness of which can at best be made plausible, but never conclusively proven.
Against the skeptics' assertion that nothing can be known with certainty, Antiochus raises the objection that such a fundamental doubt cannot - as Arcesilaus and Carneades had claimed - also refer to itself.
[22] In addition, external goods such as friends, relatives and the fatherland, even wealth, honor and power, are valuable and worth striving for.
[22] In the case of intellectual virtues, Antiochus distinguishes between those that are bestowed by nature and “arise of their own accord”, such as quick comprehension and memory, and “voluntary”, which are due to the activity of reason.
[22] It is true that the spiritual goods, namely the virtues, have priority and that a virtuous character alone is sufficient to achieve eudaimonia (happiness).
However, Antiochus does not share the radical view of those who deny that physical and external goods have any influence on the happiness of a wise man.
[22] Antiochus emphasizes that the development of the individual, which leads to the perfection of his human nature, takes place gradually, with the later building on the earlier.
In agreement with the Stoics, Antiochus holds matter to be infinitely divisible, contradicting the opinion of the Atomists and Epicureans.
According to Stoic terminology, Antiochus also called the efficient cause "quality" (Greek poiótēs, Latin qualitas).
His criticism of an artificial philosophical jargon that can only be understood with the help of an interpreter shows that he placed great value on general understanding.
Cicero mentions an epistemological treatise called Sosus,[24] which was written around 86 BC, which was Antiochus' reply to the Roman books of Philo.
Around 78 BC Antiochus wrote a treatise in which he presented his view that there is agreement between the Stoa and the Peripatetics, the school of Aristotle, with regard to the doctrinal content and the differences can be reduced to questions of formulation.
[25] Cicero knows the works of Antiochus and extracts from them ideas that he reproduces in three of his philosophical writings (De finibus, Lucullus, Academica posteriora).
A number of attempts to attribute larger text passages in these and other works of Cicero and in the writings of other authors to Antiochus, although his name is not mentioned there, remains hypothetical.
[22] The aftermath of Antiochus' philosophy in antiquity was largely due to his significant influence on his two very prominent Roman disciples, Cicero and Varro.
He also indirectly influenced the republican politician Marcus Junius Brutus, who played an important role in the assassination of Caesar and the civil war that followed.
His nickname "the swan" (kýknos), which the late antique scholar Stephanos of Byzantium has handed down, probably referred to the rhetorical skills of the philosopher.
The Middle Platonist Numenius of Apamea disliked Antiochus' proximity to the Stoa; he censured the introduction of numerous "foreign" (incompatible with Platonism) elements.
His perceived eclecticism, or mixing of different philosophical traditions, which they believed took place without understanding the peculiarities of the sometimes incompatible teachings, aroused offense.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff judged that Antiochus had "trimmed a doctrine that met the needs and feelings of the so-called educated, because it avoided all sharp dialectics and seemed to retain everything that was good and beautiful."
Jonathan Barnes considers Antiochus' return to the past to be understandable, since it drew attention to the achievements of important predecessors at a time when the schools of philosophy were in decline.
"[22] The founder of the "Old Academy" did not reinterpret Plato's teachings in the Stoic sense and blurred the serious differences between the schools out of dishonesty, but because metaphysical thinking was foreign to him; his syncretism is an expression of a tendency of the zeitgeist of the time.