perialistic, ruthless, and stupid. He failed, however; later Romans, while retaining many of his
vices, adopted those of Carneades also.
The next head of the Academy, after Carneades (ca. 180 to ca. 110 B.C.), was a Carthaginian
whose real name was Hasdrubal, but who, in his dealings with Greeks, preferred to call himself
Clitomachus. Unlike Carneades, who confined himself to lecturing, Clitomachus wrote over four
hundred books, some of them in the Phoenician language. His principles appear to have been the
same as those of Carneades. In some respects, they were useful. These two Sceptics set
themselves against the belief in divination, magic, and astrology, which was becoming more and
more widespread. They also developed a constructive doctrine, concerning degrees of probability;
although we can never be justified in feeling certainty, some things are more likely to be true than
others. Probability should be our guide in practice, since it is reasonable to act on the most
probable of possible hypotheses. This view is one with which most modern philosophers would
agree. Unfortunately, the books setting it forth are lost, and it is difficult to reconstruct the
doctrine from the hints that remain.
After Clitomachus, the Academy ceased to be sceptical, and from the time of Antiochus (who died
in 69 B.C.) its doctrines became, for centuries, practically indistinguishable from those of the
Stoics.
Scepticism, however, did not disappear. It was revived by the Cretan Aenesidemus, who came
from Knossos, where, for aught we know, there may have been Sceptics two thousand years
earlier, entertaining dissolute courtiers with doubts as to the divinity of the mistress of animals.
The date of Aenesidemus is uncertain. He threw over the doctrines on probability advocated by
Carneades, and reverted to the earliest forms of Scepticism. His influence was considerable; he
was followed by the poet Lucian in the second century A.D., and also, slightly later, by Sextus
Empiricus, the only Sceptic philosopher of antiquity whose works survive. There is, for example,
a short treatise, "Arguments Against Belief in a God," translated by Edwyn Bevan in his Later
Greek Religion, pp. 52-56, and said by him to be probably taken by Sextus Empiricus from
Carneades, as reported by Clitomachus.
This treatise begins by explaining that, in behaviour, the Sceptics are orthodox: "We sceptics
follow in practice the way of the world, but without holding any opinion about it. We speak of the
Gods