I should perhaps apologize for devoting a longish paper to a very well-known document, which has been glossed again and again by every historian of Pyrrho and ancient Scepticism. My excuse for doing so is double: first, there is a general agreement, I think, on the crucial importance of this document for any attempt to reconstruct Pyrrho's thought; secondly, I would like to offer a new, and I hope reasonable, reading, of some of the most disputed points in it.

The text comes from Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, Bk.xiv, ch. 18, paragraphs 1–5 (= Aristocles fr. 6 Heiland = Pyrrho test. 53 Decleva Caizzi. See the Greek text in the Appendix to this chapter). Eusebius, as is well known, writes at the beginning of the fourth century AD, with the aim of exposing the absurdities and inconsistencies of most pagan philosophy. He makes abundant use of some good sources, in particular the Peripatetic philosopher Aristocles of Messina, whose date has been recently pushed back from the second half of the second century AD to the end of the first century BC. The work of Aristocles used by Eusebius was an important treatise in ten books, with the title π∈ρί ϕιλοσϕίaς. Most of Eusebius' chapters 17 to 21 comes from Book VIII of Aristocles' On Philosophy, dealing successively with Xenophanes and Parmenides, the Sceptics, the Cyrenaics, Metrodorus and Protagoras, and finally Epicurus. The extracts usually include a short doxographical section and a long critical section.