"'And I will say that you are the
Sextus. I will denounce you before men, as I have denounced you before God; and if it be necessary that, like Lucretia, I should sign my accusation with my blood, I will sign it.'
We begin with a naive prephilosophical certainty that makes no claims (that is why the Bauersfrau is to be preferred to Jacobi or Reid, or
Sextus, or Protagoras, or anyone else whose presence may be detected in chapter 1); and we follow the "leading of language" till we get to the Academic Sceptics--who do "refute themselves." Having thus discovered "absolute knowing" we go forward more positively toward the absolute Concept of it.
Another of her book's epistolary poems is addressed to a "
Sextus Propertius" and has as its epigraph a Swedish translation of the opening distich of Elegies 4:7, the elegy in which a dream or nightmare of the late Cynthia appears to the poet: "Sunt aliquid Manes: letum non omnia finit, / luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos." The myth of the loyal Procris (Ovid's "fida conjunx"), unintentionally slain by her husband Cephalus, also turns up in two poems, but other losses are also at hand and need no explanation: the fate of the space dog Laika ("The dogs in your films remind me of Laika"), the black kitten that has run away, the failing summer.
Book One is primarily historical, a complex account of various schools credited with some brand of scepticism before
Sextus Empiricus; Book Two is a study of Pyrrhonian Scepticism as represented in
Sextus Empiricus himself.
[Greek Text Omitted] of good repute, honored, there has been, to my knowledge, no attempt to uncover any further meaning of the name, discover a source, or explore the connotations and resonances of the word.(1) It should be noted that in
Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism (c.
Gelzer,
Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische Chronographie, Vol.
The historical perspective afforded by this and other documents (such as Georgius Agricola's "De Re Metallica" and
Sextus Julius Frontinus' "De Aquus") invites students to examine patterns and parallels in ancient and contemporary technical reports.
(
Sextus' skepticism and Protagoras' relativism); limits of conception (Anselm's ontological argument and Berkeley's inconceivability argument for idealism).
liber
sextus (1594) provokes not only a reproduction of the title-page and a page of Francesco Coattino's type, but also an illustration of a medal showing in profile the dedicatee of the volume, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.
One decade alone, 29 to 19 BC, saw the publication of Virgil's Georgicsand the completion of the Aeneid; the appearance of Horace's Odes, Books I-III, and Epistles, Book I; the elegies (Books I-III) of
Sextus Propertius; and Books I-II of the elegies of Tibullus.