ABSTRACT
Pyrrho (c. 360-c. 270 BC), like Socrates, wrote nothing. But whereas we may reconstruct Socrates’ views with a fair degree of security from the portraits of Plato, Xenophon, and others, for Pyrrho we must rely on the remains of Timon supplemented by later reports, many of highly dubious reliability. Seventy-one fragments of Timon’s poetic output survive, sixty-five of them from his Silli, or Satires.1 The great majority concern philosophers other than Pyrrho, whom Timon assails with wit and abandon; the only partial exceptions to the universal assault are Xenophanes (Fr. 60 Ds), the Eleatics (Frs 44-5 Ds), Democritus (Fr. 46 Ds), and Protagoras (Frs 5, 47 Ds), who are spared on account of what Timon at any rate sees as their sceptical tendencies (cf. Chapter III). The longest cover no more than eight lines; most are shorter than that; some are mere testimonia. Timon’s purpose is hagiographical:
verily, no other mortal could rival Pyrrho. (64: Aristocles, in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14 18 17; Fr. 8 Ds,=2A LS,=57 Decleva Caizzi)2
such was the man I saw, unproud (atuphos)3 and unsubdued by everything which has subdued both unknown and known alike, volatile crowds of people, weighed down this way and that with passions, opinion, and vain lawmaking. (65: Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 14 18 19; Fr. 9 Ds,=2B LS,=58 DC)
Old man, how and whence did you find escape from the bondage of opinions and the empty wisdom of the Sophists? How did you break the chains of all deception and persuasion? You did not concern yourself with discovering what winds pass over Greece, and from and to what each thing passes. (66: DL 9 65; Fr. 48 Ds,=2C LS,=60 DC)
It is not easy to disentangle from the hagiography a coherent account of Pyrrho’s actual views; but we need not rely entirely on Timon. Diogenes gives us a detailed ‘Life’, which although fanciful and apocryphal in some details, is partly based on a relatively early source, Antigonus of Carystus’s On Pyrrho (DL 9 62); Antigonus was an associate of Timon, writing probably in the latter half of the third century BC. And we have the invaluable, if brief and hostile, report of Aristocles of Messene, now dated not later than the end of the first century AD,4 reported in Eusebius’s (c. 260-340 AD) Preparation for the Gospel.
