Against The Skeptics From An Epicurean Perspective

Download the PDF: Sextus Empiricus – Surviving Works With An Epicurean Introduction (First Edition, October 26, 2026), Sextus’s surviving works together with this introduction, is available free from archive.org.

Why the Skeptics Matter to Epicureans

The Skeptics were the philosophers who held that the truth cannot be known, or at least that no one has yet shown that it can. Their founder was Pyrrho of Elis (about 360–270 BC), an older contemporary of Epicurus, whose sayings were spread by his pupil Timon. About the time Epicurus died, Plato’s own school, the Academy, turned Skeptic under Arcesilaus. A century later Carneades made the “New Academy” the leading critic of the Stoics, and Cicero, who studied with its last head, Philo of Larissa, gave its case in his Academic Questions and through the speaker Cotta in On the Nature of the Gods. In the first century BC Aenesidemus revived the more radical Skepticism of Pyrrho, and in the late second century AD Sextus Empiricus collected its arguments in the books that survive today. Pyrrhonists and Academics quarreled over details, and Sextus took care to set himself apart from the Academy. But both taught that the reader should withhold assent, and Pyrrhonism was the more extreme of the two.

Sextus Empiricus was a Greek physician and Skeptic philosopher of the late second century AD. He belonged to the “Empiric” school of medicine, hence his name, and to the radical Skepticism that traced itself back to Pyrrho of Elis. His surviving books are the fullest statement of ancient Skepticism we have. Their method is to set “to every argument an equal argument” until the reader suspends judgment on everything.¹

The Skeptics matter to Epicureans for three main reasons.

First, the Skeptics deny the foundation on which all knowledge stands. Their Skepticism is the position Epicurus spent his life refuting: the claim that the senses cannot be trusted, that nothing can be known, and that peace comes from giving up the search for truth. To see what Epicurus was answering, you have to see the Skeptic case at full strength, and Sextus gives it.

Second, Skepticism leaves religion and custom standing. A philosophy that says nothing can be known cannot say that the city’s gods are false. Pyrrho taught that “men did everything in consequence of custom and law,” and his city made him a priest (DL IX, Life of Pyrrho). Sextus says that the Skeptic lives by “the tradition of laws and customs, … whereby we regard piety in the conduct of life as good” (Outlines I.23–24), and that “following the ordinary view, we affirm undogmatically that Gods exist and reverence Gods and ascribe to them foreknowledge” (III.2). Cicero’s Academic Cotta, a high priest of Rome, says the same: “I must believe the word of our ancestors even without proof” (On the Nature of the Gods III.6). Epicurus set out to free men from the fear of gods by teaching them the truth about nature. The Skeptic takes away the truth, and the old fears remain.

Third, the Skeptics are a source of the modern “tranquil” Epicurus. Sextus uses Epicurus’s word for the goal of life, ataraxia, and many modern readers conclude that the two men sought the same thing. They then read Epicurus through Sextus, and make him a quietist who seeks calm by holding no firm views. The Ethics section below shows, in Sextus’s own words, why the two ataraxias are opposites.

The rest of this introduction follows the three divisions of Epicurean philosophy: the Canon, or how we know the truth; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live. Each section states the Skeptic position in the words of the Skeptics, with links to the passages, and then sets out the Epicurean response. The sources on this site are:

• Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the Logicians, Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists and Against the Professors, in R. G. Bury’s translation, each with an Epicurean guide of its own and a linked outline.
• Cicero, Academic Questions: the case for and against the New Academy of Arcesilaus and Carneades.
• Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods: the Academic Cotta answers the Epicurean Velleius in Book I and the Stoic Balbus in Book III.
• Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pyrrho (Book IX).

Skeptics and Epicureans: The Historical Record

Pyrrho, Nausiphanes and Epicurus

Pyrrho’s teaching, as Diogenes Laertius reports it, was “the doctrine of incomprehensibility, and of the necessity of suspending one’s judgment.” “He used to say that nothing was honourable, or disgraceful, or just, or unjust. And on the same principle he asserted that there was no such thing as downright truth; but that men did everything in consequence of custom and law.” The stories told of him show where this leads. “He never shunned anything, and never guarded against anything; encountering everything, even waggons for instance, and precipices, and dogs, and everything of that sort; committing nothing whatever to his senses. So that he used to be saved, as Antigonus the Carystian tells us, by his friends who accompanied him” (DL IX, Life of Pyrrho). Aenesidemus denied that Pyrrho really acted so carelessly, but the stories show what the ancients thought a life without trust in the senses would look like.

Epicurus met this teaching early. His own teacher Nausiphanes was a disciple of Pyrrho, and Diogenes reports Nausiphanes’ claim “that Epicurus, who admired the conversation and manners of Pyrrho, was frequently asking him about him.” Whatever Epicurus thought of Pyrrho’s calm, he rejected Pyrrho’s doctrine and turned on the man who had taught it to him. Sextus reports that Epicurus called Nausiphanes “the Stockfish” because he was “without sense” (Against the Professors I.1–4). The Epicurean wise man, by contrast, “will give definite teaching and not profess doubt” (DL X.121).

The Academy Turns Skeptic

About the time of Epicurus’s death, Arcesilaus made Plato’s Academy a school of doubt, and Carneades carried the attack forward against the Stoics. The Academics did not deny that things appear to us. Cicero insists that “those men are egregiously wrong who say that the Academics deny the existence of the senses; for they have never said that there is no such thing as colour, or taste, or sound” (Academic Questions II.32). What they denied was that any appearance carries a mark of truth. Carneades taught that the wise man acts on what is “probable.” If he sails “thirty furlongs, in a seaworthy vessel, with a good pilot, and in fine weather like this, it appears probable that he will arrive there safe” (Academic Questions II.31).

Cicero also shows how the Academics turned Epicurus’s own principle into a weapon. “What is Epicurus’s maxim? — If anything that appears to the senses be false, then nothing can be perceived. What is yours? — The appearances presented to the senses are false. — What is the conclusion? Even if I hold my tongue, it speaks for itself, that nothing can be perceived” (Academic Questions II.32). The trap works only on the Stoic, who grants that some sensations are false. Epicurus granted nothing of the kind. He held that every sensation is true, and that error lies in the opinion we add to it.

In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods the Academic is Cotta, who answers first the Epicurean Velleius and then the Stoic Balbus. He offers no view of his own: “in almost all subjects, but especially in natural philosophy, I am more ready to say what is not true than what is” (I.60).

Sextus Names Epicurus a Dogmatist

Sextus opens the Outlines by dividing all philosophers into three kinds: those who think they have found the truth, those who think it cannot be found, and the Skeptics, who keep on searching. The first kind he names at once: “Those who believe they have discovered it are the ‘Dogmatists,’ specially so called—Aristotle, for example, and Epicurus and the Stoics” (Outlines I.3). Everything Sextus wrote is a war on the Dogmatists. The longest part of it, the books against the Logicians, Physicists and Ethicists, is known as Against the Dogmatists.

He returns to the point again and again:

• His stock examples of Epicurean dogma are “Being is divided,” “God does not foreknow events in the Universe,” and “Pleasure is the Good” (Outlines II.5).
• When he rejects the authority of the wise man, the first one he names is “the Sage of Epicurus” (Outlines II.38).
• When he argues that the schools disagree, so that none can be trusted, Epicurus is his example: “why Epicurus rather than Aristotle?” (Against the Logicians I.328).
• He refuses to share even Epicurus’s quarrel with the professors. Both attacked the arts, he says, but the Pyrrhonists were not moved “by the view that these subjects are of no help to gaining wisdom (for that is a ‘dogmatic’ assertion)” (Against the Professors I.5). In the same passage he sneers at Epicurus’s “lack of culture” and says that “in many matters Epicurus stands convicted of ignorance” (I.1).

What Sextus Never Says

If Epicurus’s goal were really Skeptic quietude, Sextus would have said so. He never does.

• Epicurus is not among the near neighbours. In Book I of the Outlines, Sextus gives six chapters to philosophies that others had confused with Skepticism: those of Heraclitus, Democritus, the Cyrenaics, Protagoras, the Academics and the Empiric doctors (Outlines I.210–241). Epicurus is not on the list. It did not occur to Sextus that anyone could mistake him for a Skeptic.
• No claim of kinship. Sextus never calls Epicurus a forerunner, never says that Epicurus’s ataraxia is the same as his own, and never cites Epicurus in support of suspending judgment.
• Borrowing without credit. When Sextus does use an Epicurean argument, he leaves Epicurus’s name off it. His comfort for the Skeptic in pain, that the worst pain “terrifies us, after all, but for a moment,” while everyday pain is easily relieved, is Epicurus’s teaching that pain is either short or bearable (PD 4), unacknowledged (Against the Ethicists 150–155).
• A defence with a motive. The one place Sextus defends Epicurus is against the Grammarians’ charge that he stole his doctrines from the poets. Sextus needs the defence to show that the Grammarians are of no use. In making it he reports Epicurus’s doctrine accurately: “it is far preferable to be alive because the good belongs to the sentient” (Against the Professors I.283–285). That is a statement of what is good, the very thing Sextus says no one should affirm.

The Hostility Ran Both Ways

The Epicureans gave as good as they got. Sextus complains that “especially those of the Epicurean School” were “wont to withstand us rather rudely” (Against the Logicians II.337). Epicurus had begun the quarrel himself, when he turned on his old teacher Nausiphanes, the disciple of Pyrrho.

The Canon: How the Skeptics Say We Cannot Know What Is Real or True

The Skeptic attack begins before the question of how we know. It asks whether anything is true at all. “If nothing true exists, the criterion of truth also disappears,” Sextus writes, and he sets out the disagreement: “some say that there is not, others that there is, something true; and of the latter, some have said that only intelligibles are true, others that only sensibles, and others that both sensibles and intelligibles alike are true” (Against the Logicians II.3–4). Since the philosophers disagree about truth itself, he concludes, “the dissension which exists about Truth itself is enough to drive us to a position of suspended judgement” (II.2). The Skeptic speaks only of how things appear, never of how they are.

Epicurus answered that the question is not closed. What exists in nature is real, “there is no difference between saying that a thing is ‘true’ and saying that it is ‘subsisting,’” and the senses report the existent object “as it really is by nature” (II.9).

To Every Argument an Equal Argument

Many readers meet Sextus’s arguments one at a time and take them for an honest search for truth: a case for one side, a case for the other, and then a weighing of the two. That is not what they are. Sextus tells us plainly that the arguments are built to come out even, and that coming out even is the point. The “main basic principle” of his system is “opposing to every proposition an equal proposition,” and he adds why: “for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize” (Outlines I.12). In other words, the purpose of the whole back-and-forth is to make the reader stop holding any view at all.

Sextus is just as plain about where he wants that to lead. Suspense, he says, is “a state of mental rest owing to which we neither deny nor affirm anything,” and quietude enters the soul “along with suspension of judgement” (I.10). The Skeptic began by hoping to learn “what is true in things and what false” (I.12). When he could not decide, he gave up, and found that calm followed “as if by chance” (I.26–29). Sextus does say that the Skeptics “keep on searching” (I.3), but it is a search arranged so that it can never end, because every argument is to be met by an equal one.

Sextus even describes his arguments as medicine for belief. The Skeptic, “being a lover of his kind, desires to cure by speech … the self-conceit and rashness of the Dogmatists” (III.280). The patients he has in mind include Epicurus by name. At the start of the Outlines Sextus names the Dogmatists he is writing against: “Those who believe they have discovered it are the ‘Dogmatists,’ specially so called—Aristotle, for example, and Epicurus and the Stoics” (I.3). In Against the Ethicists he singles Epicurus out again: “the lover of pleasure is further inflamed by the doctrine of Epicurus,” and the Dogmatists’ “science of life” is “a bulwark in defence of the evils of mankind rather than an aid against them” (Against the Ethicists 179–180). The disease he means to cure is the conviction that anything is true. In Against the Ethicists he says it outright: to teach men “that there does not exist anything which is either good or evil by nature” is “the peculiar task of Scepticism” (Against the Ethicists 140).

This is the heart of the conflict with Epicurus. For Sextus, giving up on finding the truth is the goal, and his arguments are tools for getting the reader there. For Epicurus, finding the truth about nature is the only road to a happy life.

The Ten Modes Against the Senses

The Skeptic’s chief tool against the senses is a set of standard arguments called “Modes.” “The usual tradition amongst the older Sceptics is that the ‘modes’ by which ‘suspension’ is supposed to be brought about are ten in number”: the first “based on the variety in animals; the second, on the differences in human beings; the third, on the different structures of the organs of sense; the fourth, on the circumstantial conditions,” and so on (Outlines I.36). The same honey tastes sweet to one man and bitter to another. The same tower looks round from far away and square from near by. The same object looks different to the sick and to the well, to the waking and to the dreaming (I.100). Since we cannot say which appearance is the true one, the Skeptic concludes, we must suspend judgment about what the object is.

Epicurus answered with the distinction that runs through his whole Canon. The senses report truly what strikes them. The round look of the distant tower is a true report of the images that reach the eye after a long journey. The error lies in the added opinion that the tower itself is round, and that opinion is tested by going closer. Sextus himself gives the clearest account of this answer, in his report of Epicurus’s doctrine of presentation and opinion, the square tower, and the tests of confirmation and non-contradiction (Against the Logicians I.203–216).

A Second Trap: The Name “Empiricus”

Sextus’s name sets a second trap. Today “empiricism” means the view that knowledge comes from the senses and from experience. Epicurus taught that the senses are the standard of truth, so modern readers often call him an empiricist. Then they meet a philosopher named “Sextus Empiricus” and assume the two belong on the same side. They do not.

“Empiricus” is not a description of Sextus’s philosophy. It is the name of his medical school. The Empiric school took its name from the Greek word empeiria, “experience.” Its doctors claimed to work from experience alone: they treated patients by remembering what had followed what in past cases, and they refused to reason about the hidden causes of disease. Sextus himself says that even this school went too far for a Skeptic, because it “positively affirms the inapprehensibility of what is non-evident” (Outlines I.236).

The difference shows most clearly in what each man does with what the senses report. Sextus accepts only the “suggestive” sign, the kind learned by habit, as when “a man sees smoke” and fire comes to mind. He rejects the “indicative” sign, which reveals something that can never be seen, and he calls it one of “the private inventions of the Dogmatists” (Outlines II.99–102). But reasoning from the seen to the unseen is the heart of Epicurus’s method. Epicurus proves that void exists, “a thing non-evident,” from “an obvious fact, namely motion” (Against the Logicians I.213). In the same way he reasons to atoms, to the nature of the soul, and to the nature of gods. Every one of those conclusions is exactly what Sextus says cannot be known.

So Epicurus trusts the senses and builds on them, reasoning all the way to the atoms and the void. Sextus uses the senses only as a habit of daily life and refuses to build anything on them. Sharing a name with “empiricism” makes Sextus no more an ally of Epicurus than sharing the word ataraxia does.

The Epicurean Answer

Epicurus aimed his Canon squarely at the Skeptic position: “If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false” (PD 23). “Nor is there anything which can refute the sensations,” because reason itself “is dependent upon sensations” (DL X.32). Lucretius answered that the man who claims to know nothing “has himself stood with his own head in his footprints” (Lucretius IV.469–521): he cannot even know that nothing can be known.

The Skeptic’s own life confirms the point. Sextus admits that the Skeptic eats when he is hungry and drinks when he is thirsty, and that hunger “drives us to food” (Outlines I.24). He trusts his senses every time he crosses a street. What he refuses to do is to say so, and to build on it.

The Skeptic’s arguments from dreams, madness and the Ten Modes all treat the senses as if any appearance might be a counterfeit that cannot be told from the real thing. Plato at least supplied someone to make the counterfeits: in his Cave the shadows are cast by figures that men carry behind “the screen which marionette players have in front of them.” The Skeptic keeps the suspicion and drops the puppeteers. But nature is no puppeteer. It has no design, no aims for men and no opinions, so it has no motive and no means to stage a show for us. A sensation “is not set in motion by itself, nor when it is set in motion by something else, can it add to it or take from it”, and error comes only from what we add to it (X.50). Even Lucullus, who was no Epicurean, saw what the Academics had done. “Even the Cimmerians, to whom some god, or nature, or the foulness of the country that they inhabited, had denied the light of the sun, had still some fires which they were permitted to avail themselves of as if they were light. But those men whom you approve of, after having enveloped us in such darkness, have not left us a single spark to enable us to look around by” (Academica II.61).

Summary: Two Different Canons

• The Skeptics: whether anything is true or real is in dispute, and so we speak only of appearances. Every appearance can be opposed by an equal appearance, and every argument by an equal argument. No sensation carries a mark of truth, and so the wise man suspends judgment on everything, or at most follows what seems “probable.”
• Epicurus: what exists in nature is real, and to be true is to be as it is said to be. Every sensation is a true report of what strikes the senses. Error lies in added opinion, which is confirmed or refuted by further evidence. From what is seen we reason to what is unseen, and the feelings of pleasure and pain are the standard of good and evil.

Physics: Suspending Judgment on Nature

Sextus’s Against the Physicists argues that nothing can be known about gods, cause, body, place, motion, time, number, or becoming and perishing. The third book of the Outlines runs through the same subjects more briefly. On every one of them Epicurus held a firm view, and Sextus reports and attacks him again and again (see the passages listed below).

Sextus does not stop at the evidence of the senses. As we have seen, he also rejects the “indicative” sign, by which Epicurus reasoned from what is seen to what can never be seen: from motion to the void, and from there to atoms, to the nature of the soul and to the nature of gods. Yet Sextus himself admits that “the evidence of facts seems to bear out the view that motion exists,” and tells of the Cynic who answered the arguments against motion by standing up and walking about (Against the Physicists II.66–68).

On the question of gods the Skeptic ends where he began, with custom. Sextus opens his discussion of gods by saying that “following the ordinary view, we affirm undogmatically that Gods exist and reverence Gods and ascribe to them foreknowledge,” and only then argues “against the rashness of the Dogmatists” (Outlines III.2). Cotta, the Academic, tells the Stoic Balbus that “no eloquence of anybody, learned or unlearned, shall ever dislodge me from the belief as to the worship of the immortal gods which I have inherited from our forefathers” (On the Nature of the Gods III.5).

Others said openly that religion is a useful fiction. Sextus preserves the verses of Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, who held that laws could stop only open crimes, and that to stop secret ones “Some shrewd man first, a man in counsel wise, Discovered unto men the fear of Gods, Thereby to frighten sinners should they sin E’en secretly in deed, or word, or thought.” Cicero’s Academic Cotta answers that the view that the gods are “a fiction invented by wise men in the interest of the state, to the end that those whom reason was powerless to control might be led in the path of duty by religion” is destructive of religion, but he does not show that it is false. Between the Skeptic who keeps the old religion as a custom and the critic who keeps it as a useful lie, the belief in watchful gods survives, true or not, because men are thought to need it. Epicurus held that only the truth can be trusted to guide a life, and Diogenes of Oinoanda observed that the fear of gods does not restrain the men who most need restraint: wrongdoers who do not fear the laws “[are not] afraid of [the gods]” either (Fr. 20).

Epicurus held that this is exactly the condition from which natural science sets us free. “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe, but suspects the truth of some mythical story” (PD 12). And there is “no profit in securing protection in relation to men, if things above, and things beneath the earth, and indeed all in the boundless universe, remain matters of suspicion” (PD 13). The Skeptic leaves everything a matter of suspicion. Epicurus’s physics ends it, by finding the truth.

Fate: “Still Unsettled”

The Skeptics did some of the best work against the Stoic doctrine of fate. Carneades, the head of the Academy, put the case in a form that Cicero said “cannot be made more rigidly conclusive”: “If everything takes place with antecedent causes, all events take place in a closely knit web of natural interconnexion; if this is so, all things are caused by necessity; if this is true, nothing is in our power. But something is in our power” (On Fate 31–32). He also cut away the Stoic proof of fate from divination, arguing that “not even Apollo could tell any future events except those whose causes were so held together by nature that they must necessarily happen.”

But Carneades turned the same skill against Epicurus. He held that “the school of Epicurus could have maintained its cause without this fictitious swerve,” by saying only that there are “no external and antecedent causes of our volition” (On Fate 23). The Academic argued against fate as he argued against everything, and he did not commit himself to the alternative.

Sextus, who collected the Skeptic arguments, would not let even Carneades’s conclusion stand. When the Dogmatists appeal to “impulse” and “purpose,” Sextus answers that “we must remind him of the controversy about ‘what is in our power,’ and how it is still unsettled, since hitherto we have failed to find a criterion of truth” (Outlines III.70). The Skeptic does not say that he is fated, and he does not say that he is free. He says that he lives by “the guidance of Nature,” by “the constraint of the passions,” by “the tradition of laws and customs,” and by “the instruction of the arts” (Outlines I.23–24). He acts, but he does not claim that any of his actions is in his power.

Epicurus claimed it. “That which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame” (DL X.133). He did not wait for the debate to be settled before acting on what he saw in himself, and he showed that the man who denies freedom cannot even argue the point without assuming it: “The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity” (VS 40). A man who is not sure whether anything is in his power has given up the confidence that he needs to plan his life and to pursue his pleasures by his own choices.

Ethics: Nothing Good by Nature

Nothing Is Good or Evil by Nature

Pyrrho “used to say that nothing was honourable, or disgraceful, or just, or unjust” (DL IX). Sextus makes the same claim the center of his ethics. To teach men “that there does not exist anything which is either good or evil by nature” is “the peculiar task of Scepticism” (Against the Ethicists 140), because “the man who opines that anything is by nature good or bad is for ever being disquieted” (Outlines I.27).

Living by Custom

If nothing is good by nature, how is the Skeptic to live? Sextus answers that he follows appearances and “the normal rules of life, undogmatically, seeing that we cannot remain wholly inactive.” This rule of life is fourfold: “the guidance of Nature,” “the constraint of the passions,” “the tradition of laws and customs,” and “the instruction of the arts.” Under the third heading “we regard piety in the conduct of life as good, but impiety as evil” (Outlines I.23–24).

This is the practical result of Skepticism. A man who will not say that anything is good by nature has no ground from which to judge the laws and customs he was born under. He follows them, whatever they are. Epicurus judged every law and custom by a natural standard, the pleasure and security it brings: justice “is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed,” and where a law “does not turn out to lead to advantage in men’s dealings with each other, then it no longer has the essential nature of justice” (PD 33, 37).

The Letter to Menoeceus Is a Dogmatic Document

Sextus’s central charge against every Dogmatist is that he “opines that anything is by nature good or bad” (Outlines I.27). That is exactly what the Letter to Menoeceus does, from beginning to end:

• It tells Menoeceus to practice what Epicurus taught him, “considering them to be the first principles of the good life,” and to “believe that god is a being immortal and blessed” (DL X.123).
• “We call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us … using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good” (DL X.129).
• The best man is the one who “has reasoned out the end ordained by nature” (DL X.133).

Every one of these is a firm statement about what is good by nature. To Sextus that belief is the root of all disturbance: “the man who opines that anything is by nature good or bad is for ever being disquieted” (Outlines I.27). The Skeptic finds quietude only by refusing to call anything good or bad by nature (Outlines III.235–237; Against the Ethicists 118). He even says that friendship, courage, justice and wisdom are “goods” only “by belief,” to be given up with the rest (Against the Ethicists 142).

Epicurus’s school taught the reverse. Diogenes Laertius records that the Epicurean wise man “will give definite teaching and not profess doubt” (DL X.121).

Same Word, Different Things: Sextus’s Ataraxia Is Not Epicurus’s

To understand Epicurus you have to watch his words. He used the ordinary Greek words of his day, but he often meant something very different by them from what other schools meant. His opponents regularly used the same words to mean something very different.

• “Gods.” Epicurus says “gods there are,” but “they are not such as the many believe them to be,” and “the impious man is not he who popularly denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many” (DL X.123). His gods neither rule the world nor punish anyone. Anyone who hears “gods” and thinks of Zeus or of Plato’s maker of the world has missed his meaning entirely.
• “Virtue.” For Plato and the Stoics virtue is the highest good, chosen for its own sake. For Epicurus “virtue is preferred for the sake of pleasure, and not for its own sake, just as the doctor’s art is employed for the sake of health” (DL X.138). Same word, opposite place in the system.
• “Happiness.” Every school claimed to teach the happy life, and each put happiness in something different.
  • The Stoics put it in virtue. Diogenes Laertius reports their view that virtue “is of itself sufficient for happiness, as Zeno says” (DL VII.127, Yonge translation).
  • Plato tied it to the worship of gods. In the Laws he calls it “the noblest and truest of all sayings” that “for the good man to offer sacrifice to the Gods, and hold converse with them by means of prayers and offerings and every kind of service, is the noblest and best of all things, and also the most conducive to a happy life” (Laws IV, 716d, Jowett translation).
  • The Christians put it in God. Augustine prays: “the happy life is this—to rejoice unto You, in You, and for You; this it is, and there is no other” (Confessions X.22, Pilkington translation).
  • Epicurus put it in pleasure: “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life” (DL X.129). Centuries later, in the second century AD, the Epicurean Diogenes of Oinoanda carved the same answer in stone. The question, he says, is “what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature?,” and “I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues … are in no way an end, but the means to the end” (Diogenes of Oinoanda, fr. 32, Smith translation).

Ataraxia belongs on this list, and it may be the most important word on it. Sextus says the goal of the Skeptic is ataraxia, which Bury translates “quietude.” Epicurus also speaks of ataraxia, which Bailey translates “peace of mind” or “freedom from disturbance.” Many modern readers see the one Greek word and conclude that the two men wanted the same thing. They then read Epicurus through Sextus, and make Epicurus a quietist who seeks calm by withdrawing from the world and holding no firm views.

That reading turns the truth upside down. When each man’s own definitions are put side by side, the two ataraxias turn out to be fundamentally different things, built on opposite foundations.

1. For Epicurus Ataraxia Is a Pleasure. For Sextus It Is Not.

Epicurus classes freedom from disturbance as a pleasure: “Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures” (DL X.136). It is part of the pleasure that is “the beginning and end of the blessed life.”

Sextus defines quietude simply as “an untroubled and tranquil condition of soul” (Outlines I.10), and he sets it against pleasure. In his chapter on the Cyrenaics he says that the Skeptic’s End is “‘quietude,’ which is the opposite of their End,” because “the man who positively affirms pleasure to be the End undergoes perturbations” (Outlines I.215). If the two words meant the same thing, Epicurus’s goal would be the opposite of itself.

2. Epicurus Reaches It by Knowing the Truth. Sextus Reaches It by Giving Up on Truth.

For Epicurus, peace of mind is built on firm belief. Its whole purpose in studying the heavens is “peace of mind and a sure confidence” (DL X.85). Peace of mind “is being delivered from all this, and having a constant memory of the general and most essential principles” (DL X.82). He who is “in opposition to clear-seen facts … can never have his part in true peace of mind” (DL X.96). “Without natural science, it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed” (PD 12). And there is “no profit in securing protection in relation to men, if things above, and things beneath the earth, and indeed all in the boundless universe, remain matters of suspicion” (PD 13).

For Sextus, quietude depends on holding no beliefs at all. The Skeptic set out to learn which impressions were true, “found himself involved in contradictions of equal weight, and being unable to decide between them suspended judgement; and as he was thus in suspense there followed, as it happened, the state of quietude” (Outlines I.26). Quietude “followed upon their suspense, even as a shadow follows its substance” (I.29).

Put “sure confidence” into Sextus’s quietude and, on his own terms, it is gone. Take “sure confidence” out of Epicurus’s peace of mind and, on his terms, it is gone. Each is built on what destroys the other.

3. Epicurus Aims at It. Sextus Stumbles Into It.

For Epicurus, health of body and freedom from disturbance of soul are “the aim of the life of blessedness. For it is to obtain this end that we always act” (DL X.128). It is reached by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit” (DL X.132). Epicurus banishes false opinions by reasoning his way to true ones.

For Sextus, quietude was never reached by reasoning to a conclusion. It came “as it happened.” He compares the Skeptic to the painter Apelles, who could not paint a horse’s foam, threw his sponge at the picture in frustration, and found that the sponge had made the effect for him (Outlines I.28–29). Sextus banishes every opinion, true and false alike.

4. Epicurus’s Peace Reaches the Body. Sextus’s Stops at Opinion.

Sextus’s quietude covers only “matters of opinion.” For hunger, cold and pain he settles for “moderate affection,” and admits that “we do not, however, suppose that the Sceptic is wholly untroubled” (Outlines I.25–30). He even admits that Skeptic argument cannot talk a hungry man out of his distress, nor talk the man who is relieved out of his joy (Against the Ethicists 148–149).

Epicurus does not stop at opinion. He pairs freedom from trouble in the mind with freedom from pain in the body (DL X.131), and he teaches that bodily pain itself is either short or bearable (PD 4). That teaching is a firm belief about the body, the kind of belief Sextus says must be given up.

5. Epicurus’s Peace Is Knowing Particular Truths. Sextus’s Is Knowing None.

Epicurus’s peace of mind is the knowledge of particular truths: gods are not to be feared, death is nothing to us, the heavens have natural causes, pain and desire have limits which can be known (PD 10–13). Sextus suspends judgment on exactly these questions. The third book of the Outlines and the whole of Against the Physicists argue that nothing can be known about gods, causes, bodies, motion or time. Epicurean ataraxia consists in holding the very beliefs that Sextus says must be dropped to reach his.

Why This Makes Sextus Such an Opponent

Plato and the Stoics were Epicurus’s opponents, but they at least agreed that truth exists and can be known. Epicurus argued with them about what is true: about atoms and void, gods, the soul and pleasure. Sextus attacks the ground all of those arguments stand on. He denies that anything can be known at all, and he aims that denial straight at Epicurus’s Canon, the senses, feelings and preconcepts by which Epicurus says we know the truth.

He is also dangerous to a proper understanding of Epicurus, because he looks like a friend. He uses Epicurus’s word for the goal of life, and so readers who would never mistake Plato for an Epicurean take Sextus’s quietism for Epicurus’s teaching. The result is an Epicurus who has given up on truth, given up on pleasure, and given up on the confident knowledge of nature that he said was the only road to a happy life. That Epicurus never existed. One might call him “Sextus wearing an Epicurean mask,” but for the fact that Sextus never claimed to be an Epicurean. The mistaken identity is entirely the fault of those today who fail to pay heed to the differences between them.

Getting ataraxia right is therefore one of the most important steps in understanding Epicurus. Wherever a modern writer says that Epicurus’s goal was “tranquility,” the reader should ask whose tranquility is meant: the confident pleasure of a man who knows the truth about nature, or the quietude of a Skeptic who has stopped asking.

”Absence of Pain” Does Not Make Epicurus a Skeptic

The quietist reading rests on the phrase “freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind” (DL X.131). Sextus’s own words answer it in four ways.

First, Sextus’s objection is to making pleasure the end at all, whatever kind of pleasure is meant. In his chapter on the Cyrenaics he says that the Skeptic’s quietude is “the opposite of their End; for whether pleasure be present or not present the man who positively affirms pleasure to be the End undergoes perturbations” (Outlines I.215). The fault lies in affirming pleasure as the end. Epicurus affirms it in so many words: “we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life” (DL X.129), and “we maintain that pleasure is the end” (DL X.131).

Second, Sextus counts “painlessness” as one more dogmatic answer. Asked what the good is, he says, the Dogmatists “plunge into a hopeless war, some saying it is virtue, others pleasure, others painlessness” (Outlines III.175; the same list at Against the Ethicists 36 and 76). Calling the goal “absence of pain” does not move a man out of the Dogmatist camp. It only puts him on one side of the war that Sextus wants to end. And the “painlessness” side of that war was not Epicurus’s side. The philosopher who made painlessness the end was the Peripatetic Hieronymus of Rhodes, and the ancients kept him and Epicurus apart. In Cicero’s On Ends, the Epicurean Torquatus is asked what Hieronymus holds to be the supreme good. “I understand,” he answers, “that he holds freedom from pain to be the final good”; and of pleasure Hieronymus “asserts … that it is not essentially an object of desire.” Cicero concludes that Hieronymus therefore holds “that joy is one thing, absence of pain another,” and Torquatus answers that “he is grossly mistaken” (On Ends II.8–9, Reid translation). Cicero himself presses the point: if Epicurus meant the same as Hieronymus, “why does he prefer to talk of pleasure rather than of freedom from pain, as Hieronymus does” (II.16)? Epicurus talked of pleasure because pleasure was his end. When Cicero sorts the theories of the supreme good, he puts them in separate places: “one that of Aristippus or of Epicurus, the second that of Hieronymus” (II.35). In Sextus’s list, then, Epicurus belongs under “pleasure”; “painlessness” was the answer of Hieronymus.

Third, Epicurus calls freedom from trouble and freedom from pain pleasures. “Freedom from trouble in the mind and from pain in the body are static pleasures” (DL X.136). Sextus’s quietude is not a pleasure, and he does not choose it as a good. It comes to the Skeptic “as if by chance” after he gives up (Outlines I.29).

Fourth, Epicurus did not limit pleasure to the static kind. In the same passage Diogenes Laertius reports that, unlike the Cyrenaics, “Epicurus admits both kinds both in the soul and in the body” (DL X.136).

Sextus Says Epicurus Makes Men Worse

Sextus does not think Epicurus brings calm. He says the opposite. In Against the Ethicists he argues that every dogmatic “art of life” makes men more disturbed, and he names Epicurus: “the lover of pleasure is further inflamed by the doctrine of Epicurus (for on his showing pleasure is proved to be the perfection of happiness).” The Dogmatists’ “science of life,” he concludes, “is a bulwark in defence of the evils of mankind rather than an aid against them” (Against the Ethicists 179–180).

He attacks Epicurean pleasure head on, too:

• He argues that the Epicurean cradle argument fails, because “to every pleasure there is linked a pain” (Outlines III.194–196; Against the Ethicists 96–98).
• He argues that “if Epicurus makes the End consist in pleasure” while the soul is made of atoms, no heap of atoms can judge anything good (Outlines III.187).
• He counts “Epicurus … asserts that pleasure is a good” among the clashing opinions that, he says, prove nothing is good by nature (Against the Ethicists 73–77).

And his whole case about happiness is aimed at Epicurus’s starting-point. “The dogmatic philosophers assert … that the man who acquires the good and avoids the evil is happy” (Against the Ethicists 110). That is Epicurus’s doctrine of choice and avoidance. Sextus answers that such a man “will never be happy” (113).

Where the Skeptics Help the Epicurean Case

The Skeptics are opponents, but Epicureans can still use them.

• Sextus is a witness. To refute every school, Sextus had to describe every school. He is a hostile witness but often a careful one, and he preserves some of the most important surviving reports of Epicurus’s teaching. The best example is his account of Epicurus’s Canon in Against the Logicians (I.203–216). He also reports the Epicurean cradle argument, Epicurus’s definition of philosophy, the proof of void from motion, and Epicurus’s account of how men first conceived gods (see the passages listed below).
• Sextus defends Epicurus once. Against the Grammarians’ charge that Epicurus stole his doctrines from the poets, Sextus says that “death is nothing to us” was “proved by Epicurus, and it is not the saying but the proving that is admirable” (Against the Professors I.283–285).
• The argument from evil. Sextus preserves the argument against providence from the existence of evil that later came to be called the “Epicurean Paradox” (Outlines III.9–12).
• The Academics against the Stoics. Carneades and Cotta attacked Stoic providence, the Stoic gods and Stoic divination with arguments that Epicureans can use. Cotta’s reply to Balbus in Book III of On the Nature of the Gods is a storehouse of them.
• The Skeptics cannot argue away pleasure and pain. Sextus admits that hunger and pain come “by necessity,” and that Skeptic argument cannot talk a hungry man out of his distress (Against the Ethicists 141–155). On the feelings, nature has the last word, as Epicurus said it does.

Who Are the “Professors”?

The Greek title of Sextus’s largest work is Pros Mathematikous, in Latin Adversus Mathematicos: “Against the Mathematicians.” The word does not mean mathematicians in our narrow sense. The mathemata were “the things learned,” the subjects of a liberal education. A mathematikos was a man who professed and taught them: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology and music. That is why Bury translates the title as Against the Professors. Because the later books against the Logicians, Physicists and Ethicists were copied together with it, the whole collection carries the name.

This matters to Epicureans because Epicurus fought the same professors, for his own reasons. Sextus opens the work by pairing himself with Epicurus. Both attacked the professors of the arts, he says, though “the standpoints they adopt are different,” and “Epicurus took the ground that the subjects taught are of no help in perfecting wisdom.” In Cicero’s On Ends (I.71–72), the Epicurean Torquatus explains the reason. Epicurus refused to spend his life, as Plato did, on “music, geometry, mathematics and astronomy, which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable, that is a better life” (Cicero, On Ends, Reid translation).

The two oppositions are not the same. Sextus rejects the arts because he rejects all knowledge. Epicurus rejected them because he held that the senses, not abstract reasoning, are the standard of truth, and that learning is worth only what it adds to a pleasant life. Plato had made geometry the gateway to his world of eternal Forms, and the Stoics prized the same kind of reasoning. Epicurus’s attack on the “mathematicians” was an attack on that whole way of seeking truth apart from the senses. It was never an attack on learning itself. Sextus himself reports that Epicurus wrote that the wise man must learn to read and write (Against the Professors I.49), and Cicero records that Epicurus’s friend Polyaenus, “said to have been a great mathematician,” was “persuaded by Epicurus to believe all geometry to be false” (Academic Questions II.106).

The Skeptics’ Long Shadow

The Church and the Academy

The early Christian writers found Skepticism useful and dangerous at once. It humbled the pride of the pagan philosophers, but it also threatened any claim to know religious truth. Augustine’s first surviving work after his conversion was Against the Academics (AD 386), written to show that the truth can be found. Once found, for Augustine, the truth was God.

The Revival of Pyrrhonism

Sextus was almost unknown in the Latin West until the Renaissance. In 1562 the printer Henri Estienne published a Latin translation of the Outlines, and Skeptic arguments spread quickly. Michel de Montaigne used them in his Apology for Raymond Sebond to argue that human reason is too weak to reach the truth on its own, and that man must therefore rely on faith. This use of doubt in the service of belief, later called “fideism,” shows again where Skepticism leads. It does not free men from religion. It leaves them nothing to set against it.

The “Tranquil” Epicurus

The longest shadow falls on Epicurus himself. The “tranquil” Epicurus of the modern books is very often Sextus’s quietist under Epicurus’s name, and the Ethics section above shows that the two are opposites.

The same question applies to the popular modern advice to clear the mind, let go of desires and concerns, and wait for happiness to arise of itself. That advice is usually credited to Buddhists or Stoics, but its shape is Sextus’s. He did not reason his way to his quietude. It came to him “as it happened,” after he gave up, as the sponge thrown in frustration made the painter’s picture (Outlines I.26–29). Epicurus offered no such shortcut. His pleasant life is produced by “sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance” (DL X.132), and his confidence rests on knowing the truth about nature, not on ceasing to ask about it.

The Surviving Works

Sextus’s books survive in three groups. Modern scholars usually cite them by Latin titles and numbers, so both are given below.

Work	Contents	Common citation	On this site
Outlines of Pyrrhonism	Three books: the Skeptic method, then attacks on logic, physics and ethics	PH I–III	Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Against the Logicians	Two books: the criterion of truth; truth, sign and proof	M VII–VIII	Against the Logicians
Against the Physicists	Two books: gods and causes; body, place, motion, time, number, change	M IX–X	Against the Physicists
Against the Ethicists	One book: good and evil, and the “art of living”	M XI	Against the Ethicists
Against the Professors	Six books: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, music	M I–VI	Against the Professors

Against the Logicians, Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists together form one treatise, sometimes called Against the Dogmatists. Because the manuscripts attach it to Against the Professors (Adversus Mathematicos), all eleven books are cited as M I–XI.

Each work’s page has three parts:

1. an Epicurean Focus section of our own, listing the passages that report or attack Epicurus, with links;
2. an Outline of the Argument, a section-by-section summary linked to the text;
3. the full translation by R. G. Bury, with every section number linkable.

The Most Important Epicurean Passages

The links below go straight to the passage in Bury’s translation.

Pyrrho and the Academics

• Pyrrho’s doctrine and his life: DL IX, Life of Pyrrho.
• The Academics do not deny the senses, but act on what is “probable”: Academic Questions II.31.
• Epicurus’s maxim turned against the Stoics: Academic Questions II.32.
• Cotta’s ancestral religion “even without proof”: On the Nature of the Gods III.5–6.
• The Skeptic lives by custom and reveres gods “undogmatically”: Outlines I.23–24 and III.2.
• The Ten Modes: Outlines I.35–163.

The Canon: How We Know the Truth

• Every sensation is true; error lies in opinion. Epicurus’s doctrine of presentation and opinion, the square tower, and the tests of confirmation and non-contradiction: Against the Logicians I.203–216. This is the single most important passage in Sextus for Epicureans.
• All sensibles are true and existent: Against the Logicians II.9 and II.185.
• Orestes and the Furies: the sensation of the images was true, and the opinion that the Furies were solid was false. Against the Logicians II.63–65.
• Epicurus “established all” appearances, unlike Democritus, who “abolished” them: Against the Logicians I.369.
• The Epicureans begin with Canonics: Against the Logicians I.22.
• Preconcept (prolepsis) makes inquiry possible: Against the Logicians II.337 and Against the Professors I.57.
• How all concepts arise from the senses, by resemblance, composition and analogy: Against the Physicists I.393–395 and Against the Ethicists 250–251. Compare DL X.32.
• The evidence of the senses against dialectic: even Sextus admits that “the evidence of facts seems to bear out the view that motion exists,” and tells of the Cynic who answered the arguments against motion by standing up and walking about: Against the Physicists II.66–68.
• Demetrius of Laconia’s defense of proof: Against the Logicians II.348.

Nature: Atoms, Void, Time and Gods

• How Epicurus came to philosophy: as a boy he asked his schoolmaster where Hesiod’s Chaos came from, and when told this was the business of philosophers, said “I must go off to them, if it is they who know the truth of things”: Against the Physicists II.18–19.
• The proof of void from motion: Against the Logicians I.213 and II.329.
• Epicurus’s definition of time (“a concurrence of concurrences”): Outlines III.137. The fullest account is Demetrius of Laconia’s report that time is “a symptom of symptoms”: Against the Physicists II.219–227.
• Change is the rearrangement of atoms, and the void is the “intangible nature”: Against the Physicists II.42–44 and II.2.
• Two Epicurean definitions of body: Against the Professors I.22, and body as “a combination of size and shape and resistance and weight”: Against the Physicists II.240.
• How men first conceived gods, from great images of human shape seen in sleep: Against the Physicists I.25, with Sextus’s objections at I.43–47.
• Souls are “dispersed like smoke” when released from the body: Against the Physicists I.72.
• Gods neither feel trouble nor cause it (PD 1): Outlines III.219, and “the Divinity pays no heed to us,” Outlines I.155.
• The argument from evil against Providence, source of the so-called “Epicurean Paradox”: Outlines III.9–12.
• Fate: Carneades against the Stoics, and against the swerve: On Fate 23–33; “what is in our power” is “still unsettled”: Outlines III.70.
• Thunder is no sign of a god: Against the Professors VI.19.

Ethics: Pleasure and Death

• The cradle argument: animals “as soon as they are born, when still unperverted, seek after pleasure and avoid pains.” Outlines III.194. A fuller version, the newborn that cries at its first touch of cold air “not as yet a slave to opinions,” is at Against the Ethicists 96. Sextus’s reply, that pleasures bring pains, is answered by Epicurus’s own doctrine of choice and avoidance (Letter to Menoeceus 129–130).
• The Skeptic cannot argue away pain and pleasure: Sextus admits that these come “by necessity,” and then consoles the Skeptic with Epicurus’s own argument that pain is either brief or bearable (PD 4), without naming him: Against the Ethicists 141–155.
• Philosophy is “an activity which secures the happy life by arguments and discussions”: Epicurus’s definition, at Against the Ethicists 169.
• Death is nothing to us (PD 2): Outlines III.229.
• Sextus defends Epicurus. Epicurus did not take his limit of pleasure from Homer, and “death is nothing to us” was “proved by Epicurus, and it is not the saying but the proving that is admirable.” Above all: “it is far preferable to be alive because the good belongs to the sentient.” Against the Professors I.283–285.
• Epicurus required the wise man to learn letters, in his lost book On Gifts and Gratitude: Against the Professors I.49.

Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists

These two works, in Bury’s Volume III (1936), complete Sextus’s attack on the “Dogmatists.” Against the Physicists argues that nothing can be known about gods, cause, body, place, motion, time, number, or becoming and perishing. Against the Ethicists argues that nothing is good or evil by nature and that there is no “art of life.” Epicurus held firm views on every one of these subjects, so Sextus reports and attacks him again and again. See the Epicurean Focus on their page. Many of these passages are also collected in Usener’s Epicurea:

• Epicurus on how people first formed the idea of gods, from great man-like images seen in sleep (M IX.25; Usener 353).
• Epicurus’s saying that souls released from their bodies are “dispersed like smoke” (M IX.72; Usener 337).
• Epicurus’s definition of time, reported through Demetrius of Laconia (M X.219; Usener 294), and his conception of body as size, shape, resistance and weight (M X.240; Usener 275).
• The Epicurean cradle argument (M XI.96; Usener 398).
• Epicurus’s definition of philosophy (M XI.169; Usener 219).

On the page, Against the Physicists Books I and II are linked as #1- and #2-, and Against the Ethicists as #3-.

About This Translation

The translation is by the Rev. R. G. Bury (1869–1951) for the Loeb Classical Library: Volume I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1933); Volume II, Against the Logicians (1935); Volume III, Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists (1936); Volume IV, Against the Professors (1949). The text of Volumes I and IV was prepared from the scans at the Internet Archive.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Only Bury’s English is given. Bury’s footnotes are omitted. Chapter headings are Bury’s.

• Section numbers are Bury’s, which are the standard numbers used by scholars. Each is a link target, so a passage can be cited with a link such as .../092-sextus-empiricus-against-the-logicians-bury/#1-203. Book and section are joined by a hyphen.

• The text comes from OCR (machine reading of the scanned pages). It has been corrected by hand wherever it is quoted on these pages, but scattered misreadings may remain in other passages. A few section numbers could not be read from the scan, but their link targets still work.

The Academic Questions is quoted in the translation of C. D. Yonge (1853), On the Nature of the Gods in that of H. Rackham (Loeb, 1933), and Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Pyrrho in that of Yonge (1853).

Footnotes

1. Sextus defines Skepticism as “an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgements in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude” (Outlines I.8). “The main basic principle of the Sceptic system is that of opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize” (I.12). He explains the formula “To every argument an equal argument is opposed” in a chapter of its own (I.202–205). ↩