## 1. Life



On the basis of a number of slender indications, Timon's date of
birth is generally set at around 325-320 BCE and his date of
death at around 235-230 BCE. For the details of his life we are
wholly dependent on the brief account in Diogenes Laertius
(9.109-115) (see the entry on
 doxography of ancient philosophy);
 Diogenes wrote perhaps in the early to mid-third century CE, but his
account claims to be drawn from several earlier sources. According to
Diogenes, Timon initially studied (after an early career as a dancer
in his home town of Phlius, an inland city of the Peloponnese not far
from the gulf of Corinth) with Stilpo of Megara. After an interval in
which he returned home and married, he then went to Elis, in the
northwest corner of the Peloponnese, to study with Pyrrho. Diogenes
makes it sound as if his stay at Elis was relatively brief; he says
that it lasted until Timon had children (9.109), and that at that
point he was compelled to go elsewhere to make money as a sophist, or
paid teacher of philosophical and other theory to late adolescent
young men. But whatever the length of his association with Pyrrho,
Timon became an adherent of Pyrrho's philosophy from then on.
His activities as a sophist (whatever exactly these involved) appear
to have left him financially secure; we are told that he then went to
Athens and lived there (except for a short stay at Thebes) until his
death. Diogenes names two kings with whom he was acquainted, and
several poets with whom he collaborated; it is difficult to know what
to make of this information, although the work of Clayman (2009) has
shown, by means of detailed parallels with contemporary poetry, that
he was deeply immersed in the poetic world of his time. During his
time at Athens--probably several decades--he is likely also
to have made the acquaintance of the leading philosophers of the time;
Diogenes includes anecdotes featuring him making fun of
 Arcesilaus,
 who was head of the Academy during most or all of this time, but he
no doubt encountered Stoics and Epicureans as well. That no
representatives of any of these schools refer to him in any surviving
records is perhaps not surprising, given the scathing critiques that
are implicit in his portraits of them in the *Silloi*.


## 2. Works



The *Silloi*, in hexameter verse, has already been mentioned.
The other poem from which a few fragments survive was called
*Indalmoi* (*Images* or *Appearances*), which was
in elegiac couplets (alternating hexameters and pentameters). The
significance of this title is by no means clear. It might refer to the
"appearances" on the basis of which Pyrrhonists are
compelled to make their decisions; one of the surviving lines from the
poem reads "But the appearance [*to phainomenon*] is
powerful everywhere, wherever it comes" (quoted in Diogenes
Laertius 9.105), and most scholars have taken this to point to the
importance of appearances in shaping our actions. Another possibility
is that the 'images' referred to in the title are images
of Pyrrho himself, and that the poem was a depiction of Pyrrho and his
blissful tranquility; the longest surviving fragment from the
poem--a sequence of seven lines pieced together from three
passages in Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus--certainly
fits this description. A third suggestion is that 'images'
or 'appearances' is to be taken in a negative sense,
referring to the fictions or illusions by which naive non-Pyrrhonists
are taken in. Possible support for this comes from a single pentameter
line, which is regularly assigned to the *Indalmoi* because of
the meter. This reads "but these things are judged by mind [or:
by convention] on the part of humans" (Sextus Empiricus
*M* 11.140); the context suggests that the 'things'
in question are things (wrongly) taken to be by nature good or bad.
None of these proposals as to the character of the work can be ruled
out, but none can be regarded as more than conjecture. With the
exception of a four-line fragment about "the nature of the
divine and the good", which is probably the most contentious of
all the fragments of Timon, no other lines survive beyond the three
passages just referred to. (See the discussion of "The Nature of
the Divine and the Good" in Section 6 of the entry on
 Pyrrho,
 for a brief account of the difficulties surrounding this fragment.)
Nor do we have any general description of the work (unlike in the case
of the *Silloi*--see the next section); Diogenes Laertius
does not even include it in his list of Timon's works, although
he does elsewhere cite it. Thus despite the importance of the few
surviving pieces of the *Indalmoi*, the poem as a whole is
almost entirely opaque to us.



Diogenes (9.110) claims that, in addition to the poems already
mentioned, Timon wrote sixty tragedies and thirty comedies, as well as
epics, satyr plays and *kinaidoi* (usually translated
'obscene poems'--*kinaidos* normally means
'catamite'; see Strabo 14.1.41, Athenaeus XIV.620e-f
for what appear to be other references to the same verse form). He
says that Timon indulged in poetry while taking time off from
philosophy; but the poems he lists in this context include the
*Silloi*, which certainly qualifies as part of Timon's
philosophical activity. The report is confused in other ways as well;
in any case, no trace of this voluminous non-philosophical corpus, if
it ever existed, seems to have survived. (There are a few lines of
Timon's verse that cannot be definitely attributed to either the
*Silloi* or the *Indalmoi*; but there is no particular
reason to believe that they derive from any of these other works.)



The remaining works attributed to Timon are prose works. Of these the
most important is the *Pytho.* We are told (by Aristocles in
Eusebius, *Praeparatio evangelica* 14.18.14) that this
described a meeting and a dialogue between Timon and Pyrrho; Timon
portrayed himself as encountering Pyrrho by a temple, as he was
walking towards Pytho (the region that included Delphi). Whether the
work itself was in dialogue form, or merely recounted a dialogue in
the third person, is not clear. But it appears that this dialogue
consisted of a thorough presentation of Pyrrho's outlook and
demeanor; Diogenes Laertius, in what seems to be a reference to the
same work (9.67), says that Timon 'clarifies'
(*diasaphei*) Pyrrho's disposition (*diathesin*)
in the account that he 'goes through' (*diexeisin*,
a word often used of detailed exposition). This account will
presumably have been placed in Pyrrho's mouth, with Timon
himself depicted as an eager pupil. (This motif seems to have been a
recurring one in Timon's writings; fragments from both the
*Silloi* and the *Indalmoi* consist of questions put to
Pyrrho--most probably by Timon himself as speaker--about how
he manages to sustain his tranquility.) There is one quotation from
the *Pytho* and one further report about a statement that it
included; both are of some philosophical significance, and will be
touched on below, but neither furnishes any additional clues
concerning the general character of the *Pytho* itself. It has
usually been thought that the setting of the dialogue has symbolic
significance (Delphi being the seat of the important oracle of
Apollo), but the interpretations that have been offered of this are
various. Aristocles offers a summary of an exposition by Timon of
what have generally been regarded as the central points of
Pyrrho's philosophy. This is often thought to have occurred in
the *Pytho,* but this is no more than plausible
speculation. Moreover, though this passage certainly alludes to
something that Pyrrho said, it is by no means obvious how much of
it actually reproduces Pyrrho's ideas and how much is Timon's own
development of these ideas; for discussion of this see the entry
on
 Pyrrho.



Diogenes (9.105) mentions a work called *On the Senses* and
Sextus (*M* 3.2) mentions a work called *Against the
Physicists.* Again, the specific words or ideas that are
attributed to Timon in these contexts deserve some discussion, but
they tell us little or nothing about the works themselves, beyond what
the titles would anyway suggest. It is worth noting, however, that
there is no indication that these works consisted of or included
exposition of Pyrrho's philosophy. Finally, Diogenes tells us
(9.115) that Timon praised Arcesilaus (who, during Timon's
lifetime, took the Academy in a skeptical direction) in a work called
*Arcesilaus' Funeral Banquet*--this by contrast with
his attacks on him in the *Silloi*, as Diogenes mentions and as
we can confirm from the surviving fragments. This work is generally
taken as evidence that Timon outlived Arcesilaus. But given
Timon's penchant for elaborate narrative conceits, the inference
is hazardous. As Clayman (2009), 13-15 has made clear, the
funeral banquet was a recognized parodic verse form dating back to
before Timon's day, and by no means requires that its subjects
be actually deceased; the genre also gives us grounds for wondering
whether the praise of Arcesilaus was partly or even wholly
mock-praise.


### 2.1 The Shape and Character of the *Silloi*



Literary devices appear to have been extensively employed in the
*Silloi*. Diogenes Laertius tells us (9.111) that the
*Silloi* was divided into three books. In the first book Timon
spoke solely in the first person, whereas the second and third took
the form of dialogues between Timon himself and the early (late 6th c.
BCE) philosopher
 Xenophanes.
 Timon is said to have questioned Xenophanes about every
philosopher--the older ones in the second book and the more
recent in the third book--and Xenophanes answered him. The work
as a whole, however, was devoted to abuse and ridicule of
non-Pyrrhonist philosophers. It looks as if part of the work was
modeled after the famous scene in *Odyssey* Book XI where
Odysseus visits the underworld; several fragments include the words
'I saw' or 'I recognized' (where the person
seen or recognized is a dead philosopher), and this formula is highly
reminiscent of Odysseus' language in describing his encounters
with his dead comrades. There are other echoes of Homer as well, most
notably from the early books of the *Iliad*, the effect being
to represent philosophical disputants as literal combatants. Clayman
(2009), chapter 3 identifies two other likely scenes:
"Marketplace of Ideas" in which philosophers are shown
selling their ideas, and "Hyde Park Corner", in which
philosophers address crowds. Clayman, however, convincingly argues
against the hypothesis of a fishing scene, accepted by several earlier
scholars; the fragments that have been taken to depict philosophers as
fishers or as fish frequently do not need to be, or even lend
themselves especially to being, interpreted in this way.



Timon is indebted for his style and tone in the *Silloi* to a
tradition of moralizing diatribe prevalent among the Cynics. The word
*tuphos*, 'vanity,' was a favorite Cynic term of
invective, and it occurs in several fragments from the
*Silloi*, as do a number of related terms. The Cynic Crates
also wrote satirical verses; one of the few surviving fragments of
Crates begins "And I saw Stilpo enduring severe pains in
Megara," which is a parody of a line from *Odyssey* XI
and again seems to assimilate a philosophical encounter to
Odysseus' underworld encounters. Crates' writings may
well, then, have been an important influence on the *Silloi*
(on this see Long 1978). A more distant inspiration was Xenophanes,
who can plausibly be seen as the originator of the genre of
philosophical satire in which Timon was writing. (Later sources even
give *Silloi* as the title of a poem by Xenophanes; but it is
not clear whether this title was attached to the poem before or only
after Timon's day.) This is surely part of the reason for
Timon's choice of Xenophanes as the main character in the second
and third books.



But there were philosophical as well as literary reasons for this
choice, and this takes us into the question of the outlook projected
by the poem. In one of the two surviving fragments concerned with
Xenophanes, he is referred to as *hupatuphos*, 'partly
free from *tuphos*.' Pyrrho is the only one who managed
to be entirely 'free from *tuphos*'
(*atuphos*); but in the highly critical context of the
*Silloi*, the epithet *hupatuphos* already raises
Xenophanes above almost all the other philosophers who appear in the
poem. The specific point for which Timon singles him out for this
qualified praise is that he was a "mocker of Homeric
deception." This clearly refers to Xenophanes' criticism
of Homer's (and Hesiod's) anthropomorphic depiction of the
gods (in which, among other typically human faults, they engage in
deception--Timon's coinage 'of Homeric
deception' (*Homerapates*) may very well be a
reflection of this point). This is not to say, however, that Timon
wholly approves of Xenophanes' theological stance. For
Xenophanes' positive view, according to which there is one
unchanging god, appears to be a target for criticism in the same
fragment (which is why he qualifies only as partly free from
*tuphos*). In fact, it looks as if Timon is suspicious of
theological pronouncements of any kind. For in another fragment Timon
(very unusually among ancient commentators) praises Protagoras for his
agnostic attitude towards the gods. This is understandable given the
general framework supplied by Pyrrho; however precisely Pyrrho's
thought is interpreted, he clearly rejected physical
speculation--and it was under that heading that speculation about
the gods was taken, in the Hellenistic period, to belong.



In another fragment Xenophanes is represented as regretting his
failure to 'look both ways' (to be
*amphoterobleptos*), and so embracing an ill-considered monism.
(This interpretation of Xenophanes, which assimilates him to the
Eleatics, is highly disputable given the surviving fragments, but was
common in the ancient world.) The ability to 'look both
ways' is therefore presented as a positive characteristic, and
this is echoed in two other fragments.
 Zeno of Elea
 is described as 'double-tongued'
(*amphoteroglossos*)--presumably on the basis of his
paradoxes arguing for two opposite conclusions--and Democritus is
described as 'two-minded' (*amphinoon*); the
contexts make clear that these, too, are intended as positive
appellations. Timon is eager, then, to reject any fixed or one-sided
view of reality. Again, the precise interpretation of this attitude
will depend in part on one's conception of
Pyrrho's philosophy, as Timon saw it; but the link with a
Pyrrhonist outlook is, at a general level, not hard to see. In the
same fragment Xenophanes is also pictured as regretting his failure to
engage in *skeptosune.* It is tempting to read this as an
early occurrence of the notion of skepticism familiar to us from the
later Pyrrhonist (or Neo-Pyrrhonist) Sextus Empiricus. But there is no
clear reason for doing so; the term may just mean
'inquiry' in the usual sense, and Xenophanes may simply be
bemoaning his inadequate investigation of things.



Zeno is not the only Eleatic thinker to receive favorable treatment in
the *Silloi.* Timon calls Parmenides 'high-minded'
and 'not full of opinions,' and says that he
"elevated our thought-processes from the deception of
appearance." This clearly refers to Parmenides' rejection
of ordinary common-sense views of reality, and of the senses as an
adequate guide to the nature of reality; and it is no doubt on the
same grounds that Parmenides' follower Melissus is described as
"above many illusions and yielding to few." This, of
course, indicates that Melissus did go wrong in certain respects, but
that is not surprising. As was suggested in the previous paragraph,
Timon would have had little sympathy for the Eleatics' positive
doctrines; he regards them as valuable because they refuse to accept
any simple-minded conception according to which things are as they
seem.



As was mentioned in the previous section, Timon's picture of
Arcesilaus, in three surviving fragments of the *Silloi*,
appears wholly uncomplimentary; although the imagery in these
fragments (shorn of their surrounding context) is not entirely
perspicuous, the general impression seems to be of an unoriginal and
self-important fool. This may seem surprising given the points just
mentioned; one might have expected that Arcesilaus' skepticism
would have struck Timon as highly congenial. However, there do clearly
seem to have been some differences in temperament and approach between
Arcesilaus and Pyrrho; and this may be a case (of a kind common in
intellectual history) where broad common ground led to especially
intense rivalry over differences that, from an outsider's
perspective, might have seemed insignificant.



We only have one fragment specifically cited from the *Silloi*
in which Pyrrho himself is the subject; one other about Pyrrho is
regularly and probably correctly assigned to the *Silloi*, and
the same is true of a third fragment about Pyrrho's follower
Philo. In all three fragments (as in the fragment on Pyrrho from the
*Indalmoi*) the emphasis is on the attainment of a supremely
tranquil disposition. This tranquility is associated with a refusal to
be involved in detailed speculations about the universe, and also with
not engaging in contentious disputes with philosophical opponents. (By
contrast, several other fragments about non-Pyrrhonists berate them
for their contentiousness.) But these fragments give few if any clues
about the specifics of Pyrrho's (or Timon's) thought. The
aim in the *Silloi* is clearly to evoke a certain kind of ideal
attitude rather than to detail the means of attaining that
attitude.



This is not to say, however, that the *Silloi* has no concern
for philosophical detail. We have seen that Timon's remarks
about those philosophers of whom he partially approves often point to
specific views of theirs as worthy of praise or criticism. Similarly,
many of the fragments on philosophers with whom he has no sympathy
pick on some central point in their philosophies as material for
caricature--Mind in the case of
 Anaxagoras,
 for example, or the four basic elements in the case of
 Empedocles.
 The surviving fragments include portraits of most of the major Greek
philosophers up to and including Timon's time; like good
political cartoons, they are sharply drawn and often savagely witty.
Indeed, it is arguable that the intensity of the implied criticism in
these fragments is at odds with the calm demeanor, and the lack of
concern with competitive philosophical debate, that Timon elsewhere
celebrates in Pyrrho. Timon may have been an effective spokesman for
Pyrrho's outlook, but it is not clear that he entirely succeeds
in exemplifying it himself.


## 3. Evidence of Other Philosophical Activity



As was noted earlier, the surviving fragments of the *Indalmoi*
include a line that is plausibly taken to point to the importance, for
the Pyrrhonist, of the appearances of things as a basis for decision
and action. Whether or not it is this theme that is alluded to in the
title *Indalmoi* itself (see above, in Section 2, Works), it
looks as if this is a topic to which Timon returned in several works.
The sole reference to Timon's *On the Senses* is a
quotation that reads "that honey is sweet I do not posit, but
that it appears so I agree" (Diogenes Laertius 9.105). Both the
context in Diogenes, and the obvious implication of the words
themselves, suggest that here too Timon is making the same point: for
practical purposes it is both possible and legitimate for Pyrrhonists
to let themselves be guided by appearances of things, even while they
rigorously refrain from attributing definite characteristics to those
things in their real nature. On this matter Timon's influence on
the Pyrrhonist tradition seems to have been far-reaching; the same
point and the same example (and even the notion of
"agreeing" that things appear a certain way, although the
Greek words are not identical) reappear in the opening pages of Sextus
Empiricus' *Outlines of Pyrrhonism* (1.20).



The same passage of Diogenes Laertius includes a reference to another
remark of Timon, this time from the *Pytho*; according to
Diogenes, Timon said in this work that he had not "gone outside
*sunetheia*." *Sunetheia* can mean
several things. But the meaning that best fits the context, and the
one that tends to occur in epistemological contexts in general, is
'ordinary experience.' Diogenes is commenting on the
Pyrrhonists' response to the common objection that their
philosophy amounts to a rejection of life itself. The Pyrrhonists, he
says, reply that this is not so, since they readily accept that things
appear in their many familiar ways; it is only at the level of the
underlying nature of things that they avoid definite pronouncements.
The comment from the *Pytho* is then cited as an instance of
this kind of reply. Timon, then, is apparently saying that, in
allowing the appearances to guide his behavior, he is not doing away
with our everyday experience of things.



The fact that Timon needs to make this statement suggests that the
accusation regularly leveled against the Pyrrhonists (as well as the
skeptical Academy), that it would be impossible to live in accordance
with their philosophy, goes back to the earliest phase of the
tradition. It was perhaps in response to this objection that Timon
developed this position on the practical value of the appearances.
While we cannot exclude the possibility that it was already an element
in Pyrrho's thinking, there is no evidence linking Pyrrho with
any remarks about appearances; this may, then, be Timon's own
contribution, prompted by hostile criticism.



There are other instances where it is not clear whether Timon is
simply reproducing Pyrrho's outlook or adding creatively to it.
For example, Diogenes reports that in the *Pytho* Timon offered
a gloss on the phrase 'no more' (*ouden mallon*),
namely, 'determining nothing and withholding assent'
(9.76). The phrase *ouden mallon* became a stock Pyrrhonist
expression, and occurs several times in connection with Pyrrho's
own views. But is Timon here giving his own distinctive explanation of
the significance of this phrase? Given the meager evidence available,
we cannot hope to settle the matter. As noted earlier, the passage of
Aristocles that expounds the early Pyrrhonist position is also
controversial in this respect. While the passage as a whole has
generally been taken to be giving us the philosophy of
Pyrrho (via the medium of a summary by Timon), it has also been
suggested that large parts of the position outlined here are in
fact additions by Timon to a core idea of Pyrrho's (see the
entry on Pyrrho for details, also Brunschwig (1994), Marchard (2018)).
Since so much of what we know about Pyrrho comes through Timon, the
line between these two possibilities is often very difficult to
draw.



There are, though, two cases where it seems clear that Timon is
speaking for himself rather than reproducing the thoughts of Pyrrho.
Sextus (*M* 3.2) reports a comment (from Timon's *On
the Physicists*) about the legitimacy of using hypotheses. He also
twice reports a remark of Timon about divisibility and time
(*M* 6.66, 10.197--the wording is not quite identical, but
it is clearly the same thought in both places); it is a reasonable
supposition that this too came from *On the Physicists*,
although Sextus does not say so. Now in both cases Timon is involved
in a very different kind of activity from anything attested for
Pyrrho. He is intervening in technical philosophical debates; the very
concepts at issue make this clear. But as we saw earlier,
philosophical debate was something that Pyrrho rigorously avoided;
this was emphasized by Timon himself as one of the main sources of his
tranquility. Again, it appears that Timon does not entirely live up to
the ideal that he ascribes to his teacher.



Beyond the fact that these are Timon's own ideas, the amount
that we can learn from Sextus' reports is less than one might
have hoped. On the subject of hypothesis, he simply tells us that
Timon regarded it as a question of primary importance whether anything
should be assumed by hypothesis. The practice of assuming things by
hypothesis appears to have had its original home in geometry, and it
is not surprising that the remark is cited at the beginning of
Sextus' *Against the Geometers*. But the occurrence of
the remark in a work called *Against the Physicists* may
suggest that Timon had in mind a notion of unargued assumption that
was not restricted to any particular subject-matter. In any case, it
is a fair conjecture that Timon's implied answer to the question
was 'no'; accepting things by hypothesis is equivalent to
accepting them without grounds, and this is a highly dubious
procedure. If so, Timon anticipates the Mode from Hypothesis, which is
one of the Five Modes of the later Pyrrhonists (and where the notion
of hypothesis has lost its specific link with geometry).



The other claim that Sextus attributes to Timon is that no process
divisible into temporal parts--such as coming into being,
perishing, and the like--can take place in an indivisible time.
Sextus uses this as an argument for the conclusion that the present is
not indivisible; but there is no clear indication that this was
Timon's purpose as well. The claim itself is unobjectionable,
indeed almost tautological; one can imagine numerous contexts in
debates about the nature of time in which it might have had a point.
Some scholars have sought to link it to doctrines current in the
immediately preceding period, including those of Timon's first
teacher Stilpo of Megara. But again, it is hard to connect such a
trivially true statement with any definite philosophical position. If
Timon retained any of Stilpo's teachings, they were most likely
in the area of ethics; Stilpo, and the Megarians generally, seem to
have espoused an ideal of mild or moderate feeling and freedom from
disturbance that is recognizably akin to Pyrrho's
tranquility.