300 ///-24 to ///-25
be undogmatic and uncommitted and unswayed, saying of each and every
thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is
nor is not. Timon says that the result for those who are in this disposition
will first be speechlessness and then freedom from disturbance; Aeneside-
mus [says they will attain] pleasure. These then are the main points of
what they say.
Aenesidemus
Photius Bibliotheca 212 [III-25]
169b. I have read: the eight books of Pyrrhonian Arguments by Aeneside-
mus. The whole purpose of the work is to establish securely that nothing
can be securely grasped, neither by means of the senses nor even by
means of thought. Therefore, neither the Pyrrhonists nor the others
know the truth in things; and those philosophizing according to another
system, besides being ignorant of other things, are also unaware that they
weary themselves and spend their time in continual agonies for nothing;
they are ignorant of this very fact, that they have actually grasped nothing
of what they believe they have grasped.
As for him who philosophizes according to Pyrrho, besides being happy
in other respects, he is wise in knowing above all that nothing has been
grasped securely by himself. And as to whatever he does know, he is
clever enough to assent no more to the affirmation [of these things] than
to their denial.
The entire thrust of the work is as I have stated. Aenesidemus wrote
the books and dedicated them to a colleague in the Academy, Lucius
Tuberon, a Roman of illustrious ancestry, who held important political of-
fices.
In the argument of the first book he introduces the difference between
the Pyrrhonists and the Academics in almost these very words: The
Academics are dogmatists, laying down some positions without doubts
and rejecting others unqualifiedly. The Pyrrhonists are dubitative and
are liberated from every dogma, and no one of them has at all said that
all things are ungraspable or that they are graspable, (170a) but rather
that they are no more like this than like that, or that they are like this
at one time and like that at another, or that they are such for one man
and not such for another and totally non-existent for someone else; neither
all things in common nor some of them are attainable [by our minds],
nor are they unattainable, but rather they are no more attainable than
unattainable, or at one time attainable and at another time no longer [so]
or to one person attainable and to another not. Further, nothing is true