Quintus Lucilius Balbus was a Stoic

STOIC

STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...

 philosopher from Cadiz

Cádiz

Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....

, Spain; the first foreign-born consul of Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 in 40 BC; and a pupil of Panaetius

Panaetius

Panaetius of Rhodes was a Stoic philosopher. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in Athens, before moving to Rome where he did much to introduce Stoic doctrines to the city. After the death of Scipio in 129, he returned to the Stoic school in Athens, and was its last...

.

He appeared to Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

 comparable to the best Greek philosophers. He is introduced by Cicero in his dialogue On the Nature of the Gods

De Natura Deorum

De Natura Deorum is a philosophical dialogue by Roman orator Cicero written in 45 BC. It is laid out in three "books", each of which discuss the theology of different Roman and Greek philosophers...

as the expositor of the opinions of the Stoics on that subject, and his arguments are represented as of considerable weight. He was also the exponent of the Stoic opinions in Cicero's lost dialogue Hortensius.