ABSTRACT
The text now standardly referred to as M 1-6 is a self-contained treatise. Its subject is the pretensions of the practitioners of six of the seven canonical ‘liberal arts’ (technai) that were to form the foundation of the mediaeval curriculum: the ‘trivium’ of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the ‘quadrivium’ of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Sextus himself refers to the ‘general studies’, the enkuklia mathēmata (M 1 7),1 and ‘liberal arts’ (eleutheriai technai: M 2 57). Logic is omitted, perhaps because it was dealt with in PH 2 and M 8.2
M 1-6 is also usually assumed, following Janáček’s linguistic studies,3 to be Sextus’s latest surviving work (M 1 35, 3 116, apparently refer to M 9-10); and in both general tone and particular subject-matter it is distinct from the rest of his œuvre. For one thing, it is more restricted in scope (see Chapter I, 6). Sextus says at the outset of the longest of the essays (M 1: ‘Against the Grammarians’) that his target is not the ordinary Greek grammar of ordinary Greek-speakers (which is useful and uncontrovertible without selfcontradiction: M 1 50-5), but rather the artificial ‘Art of Grammar’ beloved of the professional grammarians (M 1 44, 49, 56). This modesty of purpose is characteristic of the other essays in the collection too.
