The story begins in Oropo, a city located on the border between Attica and Boeotia, on the coast where the Asopus River flows, the object of frequent disputes between the two and which would change hands several times over the years (today the modern Oropo is 3.2 kilometers from the coast, the place where the old one was called Skála).
That is why the sources are confusing. Strabo affirms that it is a Boeotian city (whose capital was Thebes), while Livy, Pausanias and Pliny the Elder say that it was Athenian. It also seems that the Athenians changed its name, when it was in their possession, to Graea, something that Aristotle confirms.
In any case, in the year 157 B.C. Oropus (or Graea) belonged to Athens. Greece had long been engaged in the Macedonian wars, the third having ended a decade earlier with Roman victory and the division of Macedonia into four nominally independent republics. Practically all of Hellas was impoverished and subject to Rome.
In this context, poverty and famine led the Athenians, according to Pausanias, to plunder Oropus.
Thebans and Boeotians protested to the Roman Senate the strange behavior of the Athenians, and this ordered the Sicyonians (from the city of Sicyon, north of the Peloponnese) to investigate the matter. Those from Athens did not show up for the trial, so they were fined 500 talents.
The 500 talents were equivalent to approximately 13 tons of silver, an exorbitant amount at the time (although Athens owned the famous silver mines in Lavrio). For this reason, the Athenians decided to send in 155 B.C. a commission of three ambassadors to Rome, to ask the Senate to pardon the fine.
The chosen ones were three philosophers:Diogenes of Babylon, Critolao and Carneades. His mission was to convince the Roman Senate to cancel the fine and invalidate the Sicyonian verdict.
Diogenes had been born in Seleucia but had been educated in Athens, where he led the Stoic school, and had also been Carneades' teacher of dialectics. Critolaus was the headmaster of the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle in 336 BC, and thus a Peripatetic (name given to followers of Aristotelian teachings). Carneades, a skeptical enemy of all dogmatism, came from Cyrene and directed the Academy founded by Plato. They were, therefore, the wisest of the Athenian sages of the time.
During their stay in Rome, the three attracted great attention with their speeches on philosophical topics, which they delivered in their homes, in public places, and in the Senate.
William Smith, in his famous dictionary of classic biographies, says that both the young and the most illustrious men of the state, among which were Scipio Africanus, Lelio, Furius and others, came to listen to his speeches.
With their capacity for conviction, the philosophers managed to get the Romans to reduce the penalty to 100 talents (about 2 and a half tons of silver), although they would never pay it.
Having completed their mission, they decided to stay a little longer in Rome, where their teachings were highly regarded and they were even required in the Senate on occasion to make speeches.
On a certain occasion when Carneades was invited to speak in the Senate he made a fiery defense of the virtue of Roman justice. That speech greatly pleased the senators, and especially Cato the Elder, for whom justice and virtue were the main values of every Roman.
But the next day Carneades made yet another speech in the Senate, this time refuting everything he had said the day before and attempting to convince the stunned senators that justice was problematic, had little to do with virtue, and was something wrong. artificial necessary only to maintain order.
The senators, at first, were stunned. Then Cato screamed at Carneades, instantly panicking everyone else. They couldn't let that argument get outside the walls of the curia. It was so potentially dangerous that if Roman youth were exposed to it, they could begin to reexamine all other Roman doctrines.
So they immediately got Carneades out of there and put the three philosophers on a ship bound for Athens, with the message never to return. Something that Cato had in mind for a long time, according to what Plutarch tells us.
Although according to Plutarch, Cato had nothing personal against Carneades, it is simply that he did not like philosophy.
But what specifically did Carneades say in the Senate to cause such a fuss and upset Cato and the other senators so much? As we have already seen, Carneades preached a pernicious doctrine of a convenience other than justice . And not only that, he illustrated his doctrine by touching on a dangerous and delicate subject:the example of Rome itself.