The ancient sceptics are shadowy figures. In the case of the first-century b.c. sceptical philosopher Aenesidemus – as is the case with so many of the ancient sceptics – none of his writings have come down to us. We, therefore, have to make do with indirect reports of his philosophical views. The Aenesideman doxography is not voluminous, but the relevant sources over which to puzzle are several and varied. Hence P.'s book: the first edition of the extant testimonia of Aenesidemus.
P.'s book divides into two unequal parts corresponding to a distinction between two kinds of testimonia. The first part, ‘Life’, includes those testimonia (the ‘A’ testimonia) which relate to matters of biography. They set out what scant evidence we have for the span of Aenesidemus’ life, his place of birth, where he was active and who his philosophical successors were. The second part, ‘Works’, has a more philosophical focus, the testimonia included (the ‘B’ testimonia) being chosen for the light they shed on Aenesidemus’ philosophical thought.
P. quite rightly devotes the majority of his book to this latter group – whereas 20 pages are given over to the A testimonia, the B testimonia fill 207 pages. This second part of the book is further divided into three unequal parts. The first, and by some distance the longest (pp. 62–242), collects those testimonia which provide evidence for the content of Aenesidemus’ treatise Arguments of the Pyrrhonists, a work in eight books, the first of which supposedly elucidated and distinguished Pyrrhonian from Academic scepticism, while the remaining seven included various sceptical arguments against dogmatic theses from the three canonical areas of Hellenistic philosophy – logic, physics and ethics. The second part (pp. 243–92) deals with Aenesidemus’ other major work, Outline Introduction to the Philosophy of Pyrrho, which articulated the basic argumentative strategy of Aenesideman scepticism – the ten modes of suspension of judgement. The third part (pp. 293–369) does not focus on a particular work of Aenesidemus, but rather on the connections between Aenesideman scepticism and certain Heraclitean doctrines.
P. relies on a quintet of authors to build up his picture of Aenesidemus’ thought. Sextus Empiricus, with 17 testimonia and around 125 pages of P.'s book devoted to them, is the most cited author. P.'s four other authors – Photius, Diogenes Laertius, Aristocles and Tertullian – all have between three and six testimonia each, though in terms of the amount of space allotted to them, Photius leads with 98 pages, followed by Diogenes Laertius (44 pages), Aristocles (26 pages) and Tertullian (14 pages). The criterion for inclusion is that Aenesidemus be named in the text in question (though P. departs from this practice on two occasions, in the case of B 29, which he notes and justifies, and in the case of B 24B, which he does not). Methodologically this is, of course, not uncontroversial. One consequence is that a great deal of evidence that bears on the ten modes is excluded. P., however, is not unaware of this. He justifies the omission on the grounds that including material relevant to the ten modes would have swollen the volume ‘beyond reasonable bounds’ (p. 11) and notes that these texts are scrutinised (albeit only in translation) elsewhere by J. Annas and J. Barnes (The Modes of Scepticism [1985]).
As to the texts which are included, P.'s approach is careful, sensitive and illuminating. Each testimonium is accompanied by a negative apparatus, which scrupulously notes variants in the manuscript traditions, and is followed by P.'s own translations ‘checked against those already in use’ (p. 11).Footnote 1 The translations are always accurate and sometimes elegant. Each is accompanied by a general ‘overview’ of the philosophical content of the testimonium, as well as a more detailed ‘commentary on selected words or sentences’. Two virtues of P.'s approach are particularly worth highlighting. He displays careful and acute judgement when it comes to untangling knotty textual matters – his discussion of a crucial line of Photius which is both syntactically ambiguous and textually corrupt (pp. 125–32) is a particularly good illustration of this – and he is able to cast his net beyond texts which are primarily philosophical, for example by bringing to bear insights from ancient medical sources to clarify Aenesidemus’ exegesis of Heraclitus’ theory of sensation (pp. 351–69).
However, there are also occasions where P. would have benefited from unpacking the philosophical content of certain testimonia in greater detail. Two examples must suffice. In the case of B 15 (pp. 238–42) Sextus presents an argument from Aenesidemus to the effect that nothing is good by nature. The argument turns on the fact that there is disagreement over what is good. ‘Nothing is agreed upon by everybody to be good. Hence nothing is good by nature’, writes P. is his summary of the argument (p. 239). However, P. might have elaborated a little further on the kind of disagreement he took Aenesidemus (or Sextus) to have in mind, for presumably only certain kinds of disagreement (for example, those between equally informed epistemic peers) will license the relevant inference to the sceptical conclusion. And in the case of B 21 B (pp. 288–92), a text of Diogenes Laertius which discusses the goal (τέλος) of Aenesideman scepticism and famously compares the relation between cognitive tranquillity (ἀταραξία) and suspension of judgement (ἐποχή) to the relation between a shadow and the body which casts it, P. writes, ‘nor can the Sceptic offer a causal explanation of how imperturbability follows from suspension of judgement – rather, he just experiences that things happen to go this way’ (p. 292). Surely, however, a natural way of unpacking the simile of the shadow is in terms of causal explanation. There is a causal explanation for why bodies cast shadows, so there should be a causal explanation of why ἐποχή leads to ἀταραξία. It would have been helpful were P. to have said more about how he was interpreting this puzzling simile and done more to justify his claim that the sceptic cannot offer the kind of causal explanation of ἀταραξία that the simile seems to invite us to consider. Had P. devoted more time to exploring questions such as these, his commentary would have been even more philosophically rewarding than it is.
There are also a few minor slips. Aenesidemus’ Arguments of the Pyrrhonists comprises eight books not ten (p. 2). Sextus does not, at PH 1.36, refer to Aenesidemus as ‘one of the most ancient sceptics’ but as one of the ἀρχαιότεροι σκεπτικοί (p. 15). That honey has an indeterminate flavour is surely a false rather than a ‘counterfactual’ claim (p. 147). At PH 1.94 Sextus does not entertain the thought that external objects might have ‘an infinite number of qualities’, merely that they might have more than one quality (p. 273). However, these minor quibbles aside, P. has written a learned and scholarly book. One of P.'s main sources for the content of Aenesidemus’ Arguments of the Pyrrhonists, the ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople Photius, struggled to find much to commend in Aenesidemus’ opus, concluding that the book was ‘not useless’ (Phot. Bibl. 212 171a4). P.'s book is also not useless. In fact it is very useful. It will provide a most helpful resource for scholars wishing to engage with the thought of this most influential of ancient sceptics.
