The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Milner, N. P. 2000. “Notes and Inscriptions on the Cult of Apollo at Oinoanda.” Anatolian Studies 50: 139–149.

  Rogers, G. M. 1991. “Demosthenes of Oenoanda and Models of Euergetism.” JRS 81: 91–100.

  Roskam, G. 2007. Live Unnoticed = (ΛΑΘΕΒΙΩΣΑΣ) λάθεβιώσας: On the Vicissitudes of an Epicurean Doctrine. Leiden and Boston.

  Russell, D. A., ed. 1992. Dio Chrysostom: Orations VII, XII, XXXVI. Cambridge.

  Scholz, P. 2003. “Ein römischer Epikureer in der Provinz: Der Adressatenkreis der Inschrift des Diogenes von Oinoanda—Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung von Literalität und Bildung im kaiserlichen Kleinasien.” In Philosophie und Lebenswelt in der Antike, edited by K. Piepenbrink, 208–228. Darmstadt.

  Smith, M. F., ed. and trans. 1993. Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. La scuola di Epicuro Supplemento 1. Naples.

  Smith, M. F. 1998. “Excavations at Oinoanda 1997: The New Epicurean Texts.” Anatolian Studies 48: 125–170.

  Smith, M. F. 2003. Supplement to Diogenes of Oinoanda: The Epicurean Inscription. La scuola di Epicuro Supplemento 3. Naples.

  Smith, M. F. 2004. “In Praise of the Simple Life: A New Fragment of Diogenes of Oinoanda.” Anatolian Studies, 54:35–46

  Snyder, H. G. 2000. Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World. New York.

  Usener, H. 1887. Epicurea. Leipzig.

  Warren, J. 2000. “Diogenes Epikourios: Keep Taking the Tablets.” JHS 120: 144–148.

  Warren, J. 2007. “Diogenes Laertius, Biographer of Philosophy.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 133–149. Cambridge.

  Warren, J., ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. Cambridge.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford.

  Wörrle, M. 1988. Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien: Studien zu einer agonistischen Stiftung aus Oinoanda. Vestigia 39. Munich.

  CHAPTER 35

  SKEPTICISM

  RICHARD BETT

  MODERN scholarship recognizes two philosophical traditions in the ancient Greco-Roman world as skeptical: the Academy, in a certain period of its history, and Pyrrhonism. While only the Pyrrhonists used the term skeptikos, “inquirer,” to refer to themselves, it was already perceived in antiquity—particularly, as we shall see, in the period covered by this volume—that Pyrrhonism and the phase of the Academy that we now call skeptical had much in common with one another. Central to both traditions is a practice of inducing suspension of judgment through a presentation of opposing arguments on the same subject.

  The skeptical Academy began with Arcesilaus (316/315–241/240 BCE), the fifth head of the Academy after Plato, and extended to Philo of Larissa in the early first century BCE. But Philo’s skepticism was of a highly mitigated kind, allowing the holding of opinions, even if only tentative and admittedly fallible ones—in contrast to the rigorous suspension of judgment promoted earlier:1 and Philo’s pupil, and subsequently Academic rival, Antiochus of Ascalon seems to have abandoned skepticism entirely, taking this to be truer to Plato’s original legacy.2 These two effectively mark the end of the Academy as an institution. But the enfeebling and eventual rejection of skepticism that they represent led to a reaction by Aenesidemus of Cnossos, who appears to have belonged for a time to the Academy himself. Setting himself against the Academy, and especially the Academy of his own day, Aenesidemus founded a new rigorously skeptical movement claiming inspiration from Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–270 BCE).3 Pyrrho’s own views are hard to reconstruct, and he does not seem to have founded any lasting tradition of thought; but Aenesidemus clearly read him as eschewing all doctrines, and hence as a suitable figurehead for his own new outlook. This new Pyrrhonist movement lasted at least until the second century CE; although we have no indication that it was ever a formal school, we know the names of several of its adherents, and we also have extensive surviving writings from one of these, Sextus Empiricus.

  Thus, in the period covered by this volume, we have one living skeptical tradition, the Pyrrhonists; the skeptical tradition from the Academy, and indeed the Academy itself, has been dead, at least as a formal institution, for some time. It is therefore somewhat surprising to find that several people in the second century CE seem to have treated the thought of the Academy, and especially the skeptical Academy, as a live option. Epictetus twice engages in polemic against Academics who claim to subvert our knowledge of even the most basic facts about the world around us (Discourses 1.5, 2.20–1-5); and Galen devotes a whole work (De Optima Doctrina, On the Best Method of Teaching) to polemic against skeptical Academic ideas. In Galen’s case the target is explicit; Favorinus is the holder of the Academic position being criticized. And that Epictetus also had Favorinus in mind seems clear from the fact that, as Galen tells us (Opt. Doctr. 1, p. 92, 12–14 Barigazzi), Favorinus wrote a work Against Epictetus, featuring a dialogue between Epictetus and a slave of Plutarch. In the same passage Galen also tells us that Favorinus wrote another work called Plutarch, or the Academic Disposition. The prominence of Plutarch in this context is no accident; besides being Favorinus’s teacher, Plutarch shows clear interest in the skeptical Academy (despite also being strongly attracted to some of the more doctrinal sides of Plato), and sometimes makes use of arguments of Academic character in his own polemics against the Stoics and the Epicureans.

  Both Favorinus and Plutarch are featured elsewhere in this volume; and in recent years there have been other good, concise treatments of Favorinus’s credentials as an Academic skeptic (see Further Reading, below). I will therefore confine myself to a few remarks about the extent of the connection between Favorinus’s embrace of the Academic label and his broader rhetorical activity. The rest of the chapter will then concentrate on the Pyrrhonist side of things—though, as we shall see, Favorinus has some involvement with this side as well.

  Simon Swain has plausibly said of Favorinus that “Academic scepticism suited his philosophical pretensions and his rhetorical instincts as someone who might wish to argue on both sides of the question to demonstrate his skills in constructing and demolishing an argument”;4 and such a combination of philosophy and rhetoric would surely not be unexpected in a leading figure of the Second Sophistic. But a strong aspect of showmanship and performance was characteristic of the skeptical Academy from the start. Neither Arcesilaus nor Carneades (214–129/8 BCE), the other great head of the school in its skeptical phase, wrote anything; both depended entirely on the spoken word, and both were renowned for their use of it. Diogenes Laertius tells us that Arcesilaus “was the first to argue on both sides, and the first to alter the discourse handed down by Plato, making it more contentious [eristikôteron] through question and answer” (4.28). And Cicero tells us that Arcesilaus would invite members of his audience to state their opinions, and that he would then argue against them (Fin. 2.2., cf. De or. 3.80). The details of these reports do not entirely agree, but I doubt there was any rigid formula; the main point is that Arcesilaus worked by means of extemporaneous speaking in public, and that the result, no matter what materials his audience presented him with, would be a set of opposing arguments on the same subject. As for Carneades, he was famous for have given two speeches on successive days, while on an embassy to Rome in 155 BCE: the first was in favor of justice, the second against it (Lactantius, Div. inst. 5.14.3–5, summarizing a now lost portion of Cicero’s Republic). Again, there is a philosophical purpose in addition to a rhetorical display; Carneades wants to bring about a situation in which equally powerful opposing arguments produce suspension of judgment—in this case, about the value of justice. But the display is clearly an important element in that enterprise. So if Favorinus did marry his philosophical and rhetorical interests in the way that Swain suggests, this would be quite consonant with the Academic tradition he claims to represent, in addition to belonging well within the sphere of his sophistic activities in general.

  If Favorinus’s engagement with Academic skepticism was nothing but a rh
etorical pose, the verdict would of course be different. But the fact that Galen thought him a philosopher worth refuting, and the fact that he wrote the books referred to in Galen’s essay, suggest otherwise. Yet perhaps a still better indication of Favorinus’s commitment to philosophy is, paradoxically, his interest in the other skeptical tradition, Pyrrhonism. We are told that Favorinus also composed a work in ten books called Pyrrhonian Modes (Purrôneioi Tropoi, Aulus Gellius 11.5.5); the Modes are sets of standardized forms of Pyrrhonian argument, which occupy an important role in Sextus Empiricus’s account of Pyrrhonism and are discussed or mentioned by several other authors. Gellius’s information has been suspected, but on no good grounds.5 Assuming it is correct, Favorinus must have paid very close attention to the Modes and written about them in great detail; Diogenes Laertius also tells us that Favorinus presented one of the sets of Modes in a different order from his own (9.87), which tends to support this. It is hard to imagine a rhetorical function for this work; rather, we seem to have evidence of sustained philosophical engagement on Favorinus’s part, quite independent of his public persona as a sophist.

  The depth of interest in Pyrrhonism suggested by this work has also been regarded as problematic seeing that Favorinus identified himself as an Academic; given the history sketched at the beginning, the two traditions were generally seen as distinct and even rival forms of skepticism. But we know that, in this period and in the circles to which Favorinus belonged, there was discussion of the extent of resemblance between the two. Plutarch wrote a work called On the Difference between Pyrrhonists and Academics (Lamprias catalog 64). The title does not, I think, allow us to infer that he saw the difference as significant; for all we know, the work could have been designed to show how small the difference was. But even if Plutarch did think there was an important difference between them, it is by no means clear that Favorinus agreed. Aulus Gellius, in the same chapter as he tells us of Favorinus’s work on the Modes, briefly addresses the question. He says that the two traditions have a great deal in common, but that “they have been thought” (existimati sunt, 11.5.8) to differ particularly in that the Academics assert the definite conclusion that nothing can be known, whereas the Pyrrhonists avoid even that conclusion. Since Favorinus features prominently in Gellius’s work as both a character and a source, and Gellius does not otherwise show an extensive knowledge of the history of skepticism, it can hardly be doubted that Favorinus is the source of this material. Whether the supposed difference between the two schools is one that Favorinus accepted, or one that he simply reported, but rejected himself, is impossible to say for sure. Galen, in his critique of Favorinus, speaks of the Academics and Pyrrhonists as if they are interchangeable (Opt. Doctr. 2, p. 94, 16–17; 3, p. 102, 3–4 Barigazzi); but he does not discuss whether Favorinus himself saw a significant difference between the two. And since his main goal is to convict Favorinus of self-contradiction, it is difficult to get from him a clear or consistent picture of what Favorinus’s conception of Academic skepticism was. Certainly Gellius’s report about what the Academics “have been thought” to maintain echoes claims about the Academics that can be found in Cicero (e.g., Acad. 1.45, 2.29) and Sextus (e.g., Pyr. 1.3, 1.226); and Sextus takes this as a major divide between Academic and Pyrrhonist thinking. So either way, Favorinus would be correctly representing a prominent strand of thought about the difference between the two. Either way, though, he would also be acknowledging important areas of overlap—enough, perhaps, to explain his considerable interest in Pyrrhonism. On balance, however, I am inclined to think that a self-professed Academic who also wrote extensively about Pyrrhonism is more likely to have viewed the two outlooks as amounting to essentially the same—in other words, that he merely reported, but did not endorse, the alleged difference noted by Gellius. In this case he will have conceived of Pyrrhonism as furnishing new resources for his own Academic position.

  Favorinus’s philosophizing, then, can be seen as to some extent part and parcel of the rhetorical activity for which he was celebrated in his own day, but to some extent separate from it. This makes him a complex figure; but at least he is recognizably connected with the intellectual and cultural trends with which this volume is mainly concerned. With the Pyrrhonists, and particularly Sextus Empiricus, matters are very different. In what follows I develop this theme in particular; in the course of doing so, I aim also to put on display some central features of the Pyrrhonist philosophy.

  For one thing, we get absolutely no sense of the Pyrrhonists as public figures or well-known individuals. Recent studies of the Second Sophistic6 have emphasized the self-promotion or self-fashioning characteristic of the sophists of the second century CE; they devoted considerable energy to creating particular identities and projecting these in public. While one would not, of course, necessarily expect the same motivations from philosophers, the contrast with Favorinus—who clearly did cultivate a certain public persona, but who also clearly qualifies as a philosopher—is nonetheless striking. While Pyrrhonism in general is known, as we saw, to Plutarch, Galen, and Aulus Gellius, we never get any portraits of individual Pyrrhonists. Diogenes Laertius, in his lives of Pyrrho and Pyrrho’s disciple Timon, names a number of adherents of the later Pyrrhonist movement besides Aenesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, and occasionally cites some of them for particular points (9.70, 88, 106, 116). Several of these names appear only as part of a “succession” of Pyrrhonist philosophers, and as such are dubious; doxographers (that is, summarizers of philosophical doctrines) in later antiquity loved to construct these teacher-pupil lineages of particular schools, often on little or no evidence. But in any case, we are never told anything about any of these characters except their names and, sometimes, their cities of origin, a title of a book they wrote, or who they allegedly taught or were taught by. We do not even get any colorful anecdotes about their habits, of the sort that fill Diogenes’s pages (including his pages on Pyrrho and Timon themselves). And no other ancient author makes up for this deficiency. So it is difficult to suppose that any of them made, or were attempting to make, much of an impression on their contemporaries.

  And the same is true even of Sextus Empiricus himself. Diogenes mentions him just once, along with a pupil of his, Saturninus (9.116), who to Diogenes’s knowledge (and no other author contradicts this) seems to be the last member of the Pyrrhonist movement. Diogenes refers to Sextus’s works as “very fine” (kallista). Aside from this, Sextus appears to have gone virtually unnoticed in his own time (whenever exactly that was—more on this later). The pseudo-Galenic Introduction or the Doctor mentions him as an Empiricist doctor (14.683K), a point confirmed by Diogenes as well as by the title Empiricus; but here too there is no elaboration. And, what is perhaps still more surprising, Sextus’s own voluminous surviving works tell us absolutely nothing else about him as a person. He refers to himself occasionally as a medical practitioner; otherwise he does not talk about himself at all, except as an adherent of Pyrrhonism. This is about as far as one can imagine from the typically sophistic project of constructing and promoting an identity. He is clearly interested in somehow promoting Pyrrhonism—although who he takes his readership to be is itself an interesting question, which the writings themselves do little to resolve.7 And in the course of this exercise, a certain authorial personality emerges from his writings—including, at times, a desire to show off his argumentative prowess. What he is emphatically not interested in showing off is an image of himself as an individual.

  One possible explanation for the Pyrrhonists’ apparently self-effacing attitude is philosophical. Unlike the Academics, the Pyrrhonists took suspension of judgment to have an important practical effect: ataraxia, tranquility. Sextus announces this most clearly in a one-sentence summary of Pyrrhonist skepticism near the beginning of his best-known work, Outlines of Pyrrhonism: “The skeptical ability is one that produces oppositions among things that appear and things that are thought in any way whatsoever, one from which, because of the equal strength in the opposing
objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement, and after that to tranquility” (Pyr. 1.8). Unfortunately, his explanations of why suspension of judgment has this result are not entirely consistent. On the one hand, he tells us that the skeptic starts as someone who is looking for tranquility by discovering the truth. The search for the truth is then frustrated by the fact that he keeps on encountering equally powerful opposing positions on any question, leading to suspension of judgment. But he finds, paradoxically, that this suspension of judgment itself produces the tranquility that he was seeking in the first place. Here it sounds as if the reason for the tranquility is that one has given up on a fruitless search; one yearned to know the real nature of things, one’s lack of knowledge was a source of constant anxiety, and the abandonment of the attempt means that one is no longer troubled (e.g., Pyr. 1.12, 26, 28–29). But whenever Sextus explicitly addresses the question why suspension of judgment yields tranquility, he focuses on beliefs specifically about good and bad. And here the idea is that if one believes that certain things are really, or by nature, good or bad, one will think it tremendously important to have the good things and avoid the bad; hence one will be in a state of turmoil, obsessively seeking the good and warding off the bad. By contrast, someone who, because of suspension of judgment, no longer thinks of anything as good or bad in the real nature of things will simply care a great deal less about what happens; obsession and turmoil are thereby replaced by tranquility (e.g., Pyr. 1.27–28, 30; 3.235–238; Math. 11.110–167). It is not clear how these two stories are supposed to be related to one another. Sextus clearly thinks they combine into a single coherent position, since at one point he treats them both together, in alternating fashion, with no suggestion of any discrepancy between the two (Pyr. 1.26–30). One might well wish that he had said more about this topic.