Pyrrho

Pyrrho came from Elis in the Peloponnese. A painter in youth, he took up the philosophy of Democritus and travelled with Alexander the Great to India as a court scholar. There he is said to have met the naked ascetics whose indifference to everything impressed him deeply. Back in Elis he lived quietly; the city made him high priest and, in his honour, exempted philosophers from taxes.

He wrote nothing; his teaching was transmitted by his pupil Timon. It turns on three questions: what is the nature of things, what attitude should we take to them, and what follows from that attitude? The answers: things themselves are indistinguishable, no sensation or opinion being truer or falser than another; therefore we should assert nothing but suspend judgement; and the result is first speechlessness and then tranquillity.

Stories that he walked heedless of carts and cliffs and was saved only by his friends are probably hostile exaggeration. More credible is the tale that in a storm at sea he pointed to a pig calmly feeding and said the wise man should keep such composure. His name became the label for the whole sceptical tradition, systematised four centuries later by Sextus Empiricus.