Filodimos

Poet and philosopher from Gadara in Coele-Syria. He lived from 110 to 40 or 35 BC. In 75 BC, he was taken to Rome as a prisoner of the First Mithridatic War and became associated with scholarly circles ("he became a friend and house philosopher of that L. Calpurnius Piso, whom we know as Caesar's father-in-law and Cicero's opponent," writes Lesky). He founded an Epicurean school in Neapolis, defending Epicurus's teachings against the Stoics. He wrote "On Rhetoric," "On Poems," "On Music," "On Gods," "On Death," among others. He belongs to the so-called "Phoenician" school of epigrammatists, along with Meleager and Antipater. His poems, likely products of his youth, are compositions of liberated poetic expression and significantly influenced Roman love poetry. Philodemus considered art an autonomous intellectual expression, whose value does not depend on its content.