Before Latin literature had staggered its first imitative steps, Greek education and culture had been diffused by Alexander's conquests not simply across the eastern Mediterranean but as far as Afghanistan and India. This chapter discusses the Greek philosophy of the empire. It is important to note that many sophists and philosophers saw each other as rivals in the provision of tertiary education. Mannered style and Atticist language suggest that Achilles, Longus and Heliodorus of Emesa may have been practising sophists. Many of the subjects were popularized in didactic poetry, usually, following the Hesiodic tradition, in dactylic hexameters. The Latin literary world presents a fundamentally different picture from the Greek, and at least part of the explanation may be found in the different place in it of sophistic rhetoric. The absence of sophistic declamation by members of the élites of the Latin West becomes much less puzzling if that function is conceded to Greek sophistic.