Luciano Floridi. Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism.

(American Philological Association, American Classical Studies, 46.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xvi + 150 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-19-514671-9.

Long ago, in his classic study of Montaigne, Hugo Friedrich emphasized the enduring influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Renaissance habits of mind. Nothing in the Essais, he observed, suggests that its author "saw in hellenism a decline from the heights of the philosophy of the fifth century before Christ" (Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan [Berkeley, 1991], 56-57). More recently, Paul Oskar Kristeller has likewise stressed the importance, for students of early modern thought, of taking Hellenistic philosophy into account. Accordingly, over the last half century, the Renaissance fortunae of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism have all received extensive scholarly examination. But skepticism seems to have attracted the most attention, especially of late, with a spate of new translations of Sextus Empiricus, a revised and expanded fourth edition of Richard Popkin's History of Scepticism, and numerous discussions of Pyrrhonism and other early modern engagements with doubt. It is into this critical milieu that Luciano Floridi's timely new book has emerged.

Floridi, who inherited his project from the late Charles B. Schmitt, focuses on the recovery, transmission, and intellectual influence of the writings of Sextus Empiricus from late antiquity to the early seventeenth century. He treats not only Byzantine and Western European contexts, but the world of Arabic scholarship as well, and he deals fluently with primary and secondary materials in Greek, Latin, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and English. He also provides an up-to-date list of Greek and Latin manuscripts of Sextus--both those still extant and those now lost but known to have existed--and he offers useful graphs and stemmae that clarify the relations among manuscripts and early translations. His bibliography is extremely thorough, even including a few well-chosen websites. And while he does not, and indeed cannot, fully discuss the nature and provenance of every Sextus manuscript, his book will serve as an indispensable reference for all scholars interested in such tasks.

In a study of this kind an author must draw clear boundaries; otherwise the project may consume a lifetime. Floridi is aware of this, and one of the impressive features of his book is that he establishes sharp distinctions and consistently avoids unfounded generalizations. Quite early on, for instance, he offers an intelligent and cautionary discussion of the very concept of "influence" (vii-ix), a discussion that paves the way for his subsequent caveat that we eschew any supposition of Sextian impact merely because manuscripts were available (23). Floridi seeks positive textual evidence rather than logical possibility, and this renders his conclusions about Sextus' philosophical legacy all the more persuasive. Discussing the humanist recovery of Sextus in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he convincingly argues that the initial reception of Pyrrhonism was primarily informed by philological, textual, and antiquarian concerns, and only later by sustained epistemological interest--and even then only after the repeated appropriation of Sextus' writings within the context of Christian fideism. Nor is Floridi blind to Sextus' shortcomings. Calling him "a Salieri, not a Mozart" (11), he gives proper attention to his status as a doxographer even while recognizing the subtlety and importance of his treatment of the diallelus.

But it is perhaps in its excursus on Montaigne that Floridi's book will most interest Renaissance scholars. The Greek inscriptions from Sextus on the ceiling beams of Montaigne's tower have long fascinated students of the French essayist, leading some to suppose that Montaigne read Greek or had access to Sextus in Greek manuscript. Floridi surveys all the available commentary on these inscriptions, including the remarks of respected authorities like Villey, Rat, Brush, and Christodoulou, and is forced to conclude that "none of these works has interpreted things correctly" (40). He then carefully argues that Montaigne's Greek phrases come not from a manuscript of Sextus but (a) from the smattering of Greek terms included in Henri Estienne's 1562 Latin translation of Sextus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism, particularly in Estienne's dedication to Henri de Mesmes, his table of contents, and his detailed annotations; and (b) from the 1533 editio princeps of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, especially the Life of Pyrrho. All this in turn leads to a valuable discussion of the unquestionable importance for Montaigne of Estienne's own reactions to Sextus' account of Pyrrhonism, and Floridi usefully offers original English translations of portions of Estienne's Latin preface. Finally, Floridi adds persuasive evidence in support of Villey's claim that Montaigne knew only the 1562 edition of Sextus, and not the larger 1569 translation prepared by Gentian Hervet. He thus sets straight more than a century's worth of confusion, as well as suggesting new and potentially profitable research directions for Montaigne scholars. All such scholars should consult this book.

Students of Renaissance thought will also be interested to read Floridi's accounts of Giovanni Lorenzi's late-fifteenth-century Latin translation of Sextus' Adversus Mathematicos, and, even more significantly, of Juan Paez de Castro's Latin rendition of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism. The latter translation is coeval with that of Estienne, but utterly independent. Floridi also quite perceptively discusses the possibility that the printer and scholar Paulo Manuzio was planning an edition of Sextus sometime between 1554 and 1561, an edition which, had it come to fruition, would have predated that of Estienne.

In almost all cases Floridi has consulted the manuscripts and early printed books to which he refers, and when he has not he indicates as much. The result is that he clears up a number of errors, some of them significant, that have been perpetuated in scholarly treatments of Sextus and Pyrrhonism over the last hundred years. Even so, Floridi acknowledges that his book will inevitably contain mistakes, and he asks readers to send him addenda and corrigenda which he then will post on a website. This seems an excellent idea, perhaps one of the better ways in which the World Wide Web may serve scholars, rather than the other way around. I will take Floridi up on his invitation by noting that Donne's famous assertion that "new philosophy calls all in doubt" dates not from the end of the sixteenth century (49), but from 1611. Still, this is a minor flaw, and my guess is that other readers will only discover similarly small-scale problems.

Read in conjunction with the seminal studies of Popkin and Schmitt, Floridi's book will become a fundamental starting-place for anyone seriously interested in the reception of ancient skepticism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It offers no sweeping theories but an abundance of facts and documentation that must be taken into account in any future examinations of the textual, philological, and philosophical afterlife of Pyrrhonism. Sextus Empiricus himself may be a second-rate thinker, but there is no question that first-rate minds once took a strong interest in his work, and this alone justifies his ongoing study. Floridi's book, an exemplary piece of scholarship, substantially enables that endeavor.

WILLIAM M. HAMLIN

Washington State University