Nevertheless, in this final stage of Hellenistic culture, there were skeptics who recalled all the doubts of Protagoras, and a Lucian who laughed at belief with the insolence of Aristippus and almost Plato’s charm. The school of Pyrrho was not dead; Aenesidemus of Cnossus rephrased its denials in the Alexandria of our first century, by propounding the famous “Ten Modes” (tropoi), or contradictions, that made knowledge impossible.II Towards the end of the second century Sextus Empiricus, of unknown date or place, gave the skeptical philosophy its final formulation in several destructive volumes of which three survive. Sextus takes all the world for his enemy; he divides philosophers into diverse species and slays each breed in turn. He writes with the vigor necessary to an executioner, the good order and clarity characteristic of ancient philosophy, occasional sarcastic humor, and much dreary chopping of logic.
To every argument, says Sextus, an equal argument can be opposed, so that in the end there is nothing so superfluous as reasoning. Deduction is untrustworthy unless based upon complete induction; but complete induction is impossible, for we can never tell when a “negative instance” will turn up.51 “Cause” is merely a regular antecedent (as Hume would repeat), and all knowledge is relative.52 Similarly there is no objective good or evil; morality changes across every frontier,53 and virtue has a different definition in every age. All the arguments of the nineteenth century against the possibility of knowing whether God exists or not are stated here, and all the contradictions between benevolent omnipotence and worldly suffering.54 But Sextus is a more complete agnostic than the agnostics, for he affirms that we cannot know that we cannot know; agnosticism is a dogma.55 But, he consoles us, we do not need certainty. Probability is enough for all practical purposes, and the suspension of judgment (epoché, holding back; aphasia, saying nothing) in philosophical questions, instead of disturbing the mind, brings it a careless peace (ataraxia).56 Meanwhile, since nothing is certain, let us accept the conventions and beliefs of our time and place, and modestly worship our ancient gods.57
Lucian would have belonged to the Skeptic school if he had been so unwise as to fetter his judgment with a label. Like Voltaire, whom he resembled in all but pity, he wrote philosophy so brilliantly that no one supposed that he was writing philosophy. As if to show the spread of Hellenism, he was born at Samosata, in distant Commagene; “I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,” he said; his native tongue was Syriac, his blood probably Semitic.58 He was apprenticed to a sculptor, but deserted to a rhetor. After a stay in Antioch practicing law he took to the road as a “dependent scholar,” living by lecturing, especially in Rome and Gaul; then (A.D. 165) he settled down in Athens. In his later years he was rescued from poverty by the pious but tolerant Marcus Aurelius, who appointed the irreverent skeptic to an official post in Egypt. There, at a date unknown, he died.
Time has preserved seventy-six of Lucian’s little books, and many of them are as fresh and pertinent today as when he read them to friends and audiences eighteen centuries ago. He tried his hand at a variety of forms, until he found a congenial medium in the dialogue. His Dialogues of the Hetairai were free enough to win a large audience. But at least in his works he is more absorbed in the gods than in courtesans; he is never through mishandling them. “When I was a boy,” says his Menippus, “and heard the tales of Homer and Hesiod about the gods—adulterous gods, rapacious gods, violent, litigious, incestuous gods—I found it all quite proper and, indeed, was intensely interested. When, however, I came to man’s estate I observed that the laws flatly contradicted the poets, forbidding adultery and rapacity.” Perplexed, Menippus went to the philosophers for an explanation; but they were so busy refuting one another that they only confounded his confusion. So he made himself wings, flew up to heaven, and examined matters for himself. Zeus received him magnanimously and allowed him to watch Olympus functioning. Zeus himself was listening to prayers as they came up to him through “a row of openings with lids like well covers. … Of those at sea one prayed for a north, another for a south, wind. The farmer asked for rain, the fuller for sun. . . . Zeus seemed puzzled; he did not know which prayer to grant, and experienced a truly Academic suspension of judgment, showing a reserve and equilibrium worthy of Pyrrho (himself.”59 The great god rejects some petitions, grants others, and then arranges the day’s weather: rain for Scythia, snow for Greece, a storm in the Adriatic, and “about a thousand bushels of hail for Cappadocia.” Zeus is disturbed by the new and outlandish gods who have stolen into his pantheon; he issues a decree that, whereas Olympus is crowded with polyglot aliens, who have caused a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and only true gods are being squeezed out, a committee of seven shall be appointed to sit on claims. In “Zeus Cross-Examined” an Epicurean philosopher asks Zeus are the gods also subject to Fate? Yes, answers the genial Jove. “Why, then, should men sacrifice to you?” asks the philosopher; and “if Fate rules men and gods, why should we be held responsible for our actions?” “I see,” says Zeus, “that you have been with that accursed race, the sophists.”60 In “Zeus Tragoedus” the god is in a gloomy mood, for he observes a great crowd gathering in Athens to hear Damis the Epicurean deny, and Timocles the Stoic affirm, the existence and solicitude of the gods. Timocles breaks down and runs away, and Zeus despairs about his own future. Hermes comforts him: “There are plenty of believers left—a majority of Greeks, the body and dregs of the people, and the barbarians to a man.”61 That such a piece should have brought no indictment on Lucian’s head proves either the tolerance of the times or the twilight of the Greek gods.
But Lucian was as skeptical of rhetoric and philosophy as of the old religion. In one of his Dialogues of the Dead Charon commands a rhetorician, whom he is ferrying to the other world, to “strip off that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped around you, and those antitheses, and balanced clauses”—otherwise the boat will surely sink.62 In “Hermotimus” a student enters with enthusiasm upon the study of philosophy, hoping that it will give him some substitute for faith; but he is shocked by the vanity and greed of the rival teachers, and is left intellectually and morally naked by their mutual refutations; henceforth, he concludes, “I shall turn aside from a philosopher as from a mad dog.”63 Lucian himself defines philosophy as an attempt to “get an elevation from which you may see in every direction.”64 From such an elevation life seems to him a ridiculous confusion, a chaotic chorus in which all the dancers move and shout each at his own individual will, “until the impresario dismisses them one by one from the stage.”65 In “Charon” he paints a dark picture of the human scene as witnessed by superhuman eyes from some celestial peak: men plowing, toiling, disputing, suing in the courts, lending at usury, cheating and being cheated, running after gold or pleasure; over their heads a cloud of hopes, fears, follies, and hates; over these the Fates spinning the web of life for each human atom; one man is lifted high from the mass and then has a resounding fall; and each in turn is drawn away by some messenger of death. Charon observes two armies fighting in the Peloponnesus; “Fools!” he comments, “not to know that though each of them should win a whole Peloponnesus he will get but a bare foot of ground in the end.”66 Lucian is as impartial as nature; he satirizes the rich for their greed, the poor for their envy, the philosophers for their cobwebs, the gods for their nonexistence. In the end he concludes with Voltaire that one must cultivate his garden. Menippus, finding Teiresias in the lower world, asks him, What is the best life? The old prophet answers:
The life of the ordinary man is the best and most prudent choice. Cease from the folly of metaphysical speculation and inquiry into origins and ends; count all this clever logic as idle talk, and pursue one end alone—how you may do what your hand finds to do, and go your way with never a passion and always a smile.67
If we sum up Greek thought in the first two centuries of our era, we find it, despite Lucian, overwhelmingly religious. Men had once lost faith in faith and taken to logic; now they were losing faith in logic and were flocking back to faith. Greek philosophy had completed the circuit from primitive theology through the skepticism of the early Sophists, the atheism of Democritus, the reconciliatory blandishments of Plato, the naturalism of Aristotle, and the pantheism of the Stoa back to a philosophy of mysticism, submission, and piety. The Academy had passed from the utilitarian myths of its founder through the skepticism of Carneades to the learned devotion of Plutarch; soon it would culminate in the heavenly visions of Plotinus. The scientific achievements of Pythagoras were forgotten, but his notion of reincarnation was having another life; Neo-Pythagoreans were exploring the mysticism of number, were practicing a daily examination of conscience, and were praying that after a minimum of avatars they might pass—if necessary through Purgatory—into a blessed union with God.68 Stoicism was ceasing to be the proud and scornful philosophy of aristocrats, and had found its final and most eloquent voice in a slave; its doctrine of a final conflagration of the world, its rejection of all pleasures of the flesh, its humble surrender to the hidden will of God, were preparing for the theology and ethics of Christianity. The Oriental mood was capturing the European citadel.
I Arrian later issued an Encheiridion, or synoptic “Handbook” of Epictetus.
II Some of them: (1) The sense organs (e.g., eyes) of different animals, even of different men, vary in form and structure, and presumably give diverse pictures of the world; how do we know which picture is true? (2) The senses convey only a fraction of the object—e.g., a limited range of colors, sounds, and smells; clearly the conception that we form of the object is parcial and unreliable. (3) One sense sometimes contradicts another. (4) Our physical and mental condition colors and perhaps discolors our perceptions—awake or sleeping, youth or age, motion or rest, hunger or satiety, hatred or love. (6) The appearance of an object varies according to the condition of the surrounding media—light, air, cold, heat, moisture, etc.; which appearance is “real”? (8) Nothing is known by itself or absolutely, but only in relation to something else, ta pros ti. (10) An individual’s beliefs depend upon the customs, religion, institutions, and laws amid which he was reared; no individual can think objectively.50