ABSTRACT
Sextus was a doctor, and the author of medical treatises (M 7 202, M 1 61); indeed, he paints the Sceptical programme as being essentially therapeutic in nature (Chapter XVIII, 300ff.), and the connections between medicine and philosophy in the ancient world run deep. Plato thought that philosophy was the medicine of the soul; Philo of Larissa made a detailed comparison between the job of the doctor and that of the sceptical philosopher (Stobaeus, Eclogae 262). And we have seen how the physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus nourished the sceptical tradition.
