Sextus Empiricus - Introduction and Epicurean Guide

Why Sextus Empiricus Matters to Epicureans

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

Epicureans should read Sextus for two reasons.

First, Sextus is the opponent. His Scepticism 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. Epicurus answered: “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). Lucretius answered that the man who claims to know nothing “has himself stood with his own head in his footprints” (Lucretius 4.469–521). To see what Epicurus was answering, you have to see the Sceptic case at full strength, and Sextus gives it.

Second, 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 own teaching. The best example is the account of Epicurus’s Canon, his doctrine of the standards of truth, in Against the Logicians. He even defends Epicurus once, against the charge of stealing his doctrines from the poets.

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. 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).

Two Opposite Goals

Sextus says the goal of the Sceptic is “quietude” (ataraxia), reached by suspending judgement and giving up the search for truth (Outlines I.25–30). He contrasts this directly with the pleasure schools. Pleasure as the end, he says, is “the opposite” of Sceptic quietude (Outlines I.215).

This matters for how Epicurus is presented today. Epicurus’s goal is pleasure, and in an even wider way than that pursued by the Cyrenaics. Epicurean confidence comes from knowing the truth about nature, the gods and death, not from despairing of truth. When modern writers make “tranquility” the Epicurean goal, they borrow the vocabulary of a school which Epicurus opposed and which actively opposed Epicurus. Sextus himself never confused the two.

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 Sceptic 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.

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.
• Preconception (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 10.32.
• 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 the 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 the 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.
• The 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.
• 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 Sceptic cannot argue away pain and pleasure: Sextus admits that these come “by necessity,” and then consoles the Sceptic 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 the 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 (identifiers in.ernet.dli.2015.183761 and sextusempiricus_201912), with the two pages missing from the Volume IV scan supplied from a privately owned copy. Volumes II and III were prepared from that privately owned copy, which gives the cleanest text; one page missing from its Volume II was supplied from the Internet Archive scan (in.ernet.dli.2015.183448). The copyright renewal records for 1950 to 1977 show no renewal for any of these volumes, so they are in the public domain in the United States. Bury died in 1951, so they are also out of copyright in countries where copyright lasts for the author’s life plus seventy years.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Only Bury’s English is given. The facing Greek text and 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 text is complete. Pages missing from one copy were supplied from the other.