ABSTRACT
One of the most striking features of ancient Greek philosophy, and indeed of ancient Greek culture more generally, is a development of various forms of skepticism. A casual survey of the works that survive from the archaic period of ancient Greece might give the impression that the culture of that period lacked any clear epistemology, any clear theory of knowledge, at all. Among the various forms of skepticism that the Greeks developed the earliest, however, was what one might call literary skepticism. Literary skepticism is interestingly different from the various forms of philosophical skepticism that arose in antiquity - for example, in Xenophanes, Parmenides, Protagoras, Socrates, the Pyrrhonists, and the Academic skeptics. Literary skepticism subsequently re-emerged in the form of a late after-echo with Christianity. For within Christianity a variant of it occurs, not indeed in relation to God as before, but instead in relation to the devil and his minions.
