The aim of my paper is to analyse the social and the political role of Academic philosophers and the Academy in Athens between the founding of the Academy by Plato in the 380ies and the destruction of the ground of the Academy by Sulla in 86. Next to much discussed literary sources as the Lives of Diogenes Laertius, Philodemus' History of the Academy, and various fragments of Attic comedy, I will focus on three inscriptions (IG II² 886; IG II² 3781; IG II² 12764) regarding the scholarchs Euandrus of Phocaea, Carneades of Cyrene and Telecles of Phocaea as well as the so-called ephebic decrees concerning the ephebes' visit of philosophical lectures in the late second and first centuries.(Matthias Haake, University of Münster)
