ABSTRACT
Modern scholarship recognizes two traditions of scepticism in the Graeco-Roman world. The centrepiece of Sextus' scepticism is suspension of judgement. The only sceptic of either tradition of whom complete works survive is Sextus Empiricus, who is generally thought to have been active in the second century ce, and who appears to belong near the end of the Pyrrhonist movement. There is a longstanding debate about whether Sextus means to restrict the sceptic's focus to the theoretical accounts of the underlying natures of things offered by non-sceptical philosophers, or whether he is operating with a more everyday distinction between how things appear and how they are. Sextus' response is precisely along the lines one would expect from his general account of how the sceptic acts by following appearances. Still, the central question about the tyrant example is whether Sextus is right that, contrary to the objection, the sceptic can stay free from definite beliefs in this extreme situation.
