ABSTRACT
Pyrrho is the first philosopher the tradition describes as a sceptic (Chapter IV, 58ff.); but he was not the first to sound a note of epistemological caution. That fact, coupled with the general Greek tendency of tracing one’s intellectual pedigree to the great men of the past, makes it unsurprising that Sextus, among others, turns to the Presocratics to find the origins of the Sceptical Way. Diogenes Laertius records that some people even saw Homer as the founder of scepticism, because he ‘says different things in different places about the same things’ (DL 9 71, 73; cf. 67),1 and found sceptical strains in the poets Archilochus and Euripides (ibid.); Sextus too discovers epistemology in the same three poets (M 7 128).
