The Day That Dawned

by Antiochus of Ascalon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Cicero liked me, and that is why his question still hurts. He studied with me in Athens in his twenty-eighth year. In his books he lets my friends speak for me at length and with care. And in the middle of the second book of his Academica, after Lucullus has given my case and before Cicero starts to take it apart, he stops to deal with me personally. He does not deal with my arguments there. He deals with my life.

I was, he says, a man who learned the doctrines of the Academy from Philo for so long that everyone agreed no one had studied them longer, who wrote on them with great acuteness, and who in old age attacked them no more sharply than he had once defended them. "However acute he was, and he was," Cicero goes on, "his authority is lessened by his inconstancy." Then comes the sentence I have never been able to put down: quis enim iste dies inluxerit quaero. I ask what day it was that dawned on him and showed him the mark of true and false, which for so many years he had denied there was.

It is a fair question, and I mean to answer it. I owe Cicero a better answer than the one he guessed at for me, and I owe the young who read him a better one than they usually supply, which is that I was vain, or that I was tired, or that I quarrelled with my teacher and made a philosophy out of the quarrel. Each of those has been said. Some of it Cicero said first.

So here is the day. It was a day in Alexandria, and it came out of two books.

I. Two books on a table

The story is told in Cicero's dialogue by Lucullus, who was there, and I will tell it as he tells it, because he was a careful witness, and a friend, and he did not make me look better than I was.

Lucullus was proquaestor in Alexandria, and I was with him. Already living in the city, and long a friend of mine, was Heraclitus of Tyre. He had heard Clitomachus for many years and then Philo, and Lucullus calls him a man well regarded and distinguished in that philosophy which, as Lucullus puts it, "is now almost abandoned and is being called back." Heraclitus and I argued often. Lucullus says that we did it gently, both of us. That is true. We were two pupils of the same school, far from Athens, and each of us knew every move the other would make.

Then the two books came. Philo had gone to Rome to escape the war, and in Rome he had written them, and copies had been brought to Alexandria, and that was the first time I held them. I will use Lucullus's words for what happened next, because they are not flattering, and I want you to see that I am not hiding them. Homo natura lenissimus, he says, a man by nature most gentle, "for nothing could have been milder than he was, nevertheless began to lose his temper. I was astonished, for I had never seen it before."

I lost my temper. I am not going to say that I was calm and simply weighed a new argument. I was angry, and the anger was the anger of a man who has been told in his teacher's own hand that what he defended for half his life was not what he had thought it was.

What I did with the anger is the important part. I did not throw the books down. I turned to Heraclitus, who had heard both Clitomachus and Philo for longer than I had, and I asked him two questions. Did these seem to him to be Philo's views? And had he ever heard such things, either from Philo or from any Academic at all? He said no. He had never heard them. But he recognised the writing as Philo's. And that could not be doubted in any case, because three of Lucullus's friends were in the room, Publius and Gaius Selius and Tetrilius Rogus, and they said they had heard Philo say these things in Rome and had copied the two books from Philo's own copy.

Now look at what I was doing. I was not acting on my own impression of the books. I was checking it. I asked the best witness in Alexandria whether the books said what I thought they said and whether what they said was new. I had a second witness to the authorship, and a third and fourth. That is how a man behaves who believes that some things can be settled. It is not, I think, how a man behaves who has simply been insulted.

Lucullus adds that I said a great many things to Heraclitus that day, among them the things Catulus's father had said to Philo's face in Rome, which was, briefly, that Philo was lying about his own school. And then, he says, I could not restrain myself from publishing a book against my own teacher, which I called the Sosus. After that, for several days, with Heraclitus and other learned men and my brother Aristus, and Aristo and Dio, whom I valued next after my brother, we spent a great deal of time on that one dispute. Lucullus sat through it in order to learn the whole case from me. It was not a fit of rage. It was a long examination, in company, with the other side present and allowed to speak.

That was the day that dawned. Cicero asks what it showed me. I will tell him.

II. What Philo said

You must first know what the books said, because they are lost, as all my own books are, and what is lost is easily misdescribed.

The Academy, from Arcesilaus to Philo, had taught that nothing can be grasped. When the Stoics said there is an impression that grasps its object, an impression stamped and moulded by the thing that is, of such a kind that it could not come from a thing that is not, the Academy answered that no impression is of that kind. For every true impression there may be a false one that looks the same: twins, a dream, a madman's vision, a wax seal pressed twice. If no impression carries a mark that a false one could not carry, then nothing is grasped, and the wise man will withhold assent. On that point the Academy and the Stoa fought for a century and a half. Everyone knew which side was which.

Philo's Roman books said that this was not, in fact, what the Academy had taught. There were not two Academies, an old one that held doctrine and a new one that held none. There had always been one. The Academics had never said that things cannot be known. They had said that things cannot be known by the Stoic criterion, by Zeno's definition of the grasping impression, and since Zeno's definition was too strict, nothing satisfied it. Things were not beyond our grasp in their own nature. They were beyond Zeno's grasp.

On its face, this was a peace offering. It told the world that the Academy was not, after all, the school that said no one could know anything. It was a school that said only that one particular theory of knowledge was wrong. Many people liked it. It sounded reasonable. It made the Academy much easier to belong to.

I did not like it. Lucullus says why, and he says it in my words, which he had from me in Alexandria. Philo, he says, dum nova quaedam commovet, while he was stirring up these new things, "because he could hardly withstand what was said against the obstinacy of the Academics, both told an open lie, as Catulus's father rebuked him for, and, as Antiochus showed, fell into the very thing he feared."

There are two charges there. The second is the philosophical one, and it is the reason for everything I did afterwards, so I will set it out slowly.

Philo wanted to keep knowledge and abolish Zeno's definition. But Zeno's definition is not a decoration on knowledge. It is the account of what makes an impression knowable at all. If an impression could be exactly as it is and yet be false, how can you be confident that you have grasped and recognised anything by it? Take away the requirement that the knowing impression be one that could not come from what is not, and you take away the difference between the known and the unknown. Then nothing can be grasped, which is the position Philo was trying to soften. Lucullus says it in one line: ita imprudens eo quo minime volt revolvitur. Without meaning to, he rolls back to the very place he least wants to be.

So Philo had a choice he would not make. Either keep Zeno's definition and say, with Arcesilaus and Carneades, that nothing meets it, and so nothing can be known; or abandon it, and find that you have abandoned the means of telling knowledge from opinion, and so, again, nothing can be known. What you cannot do is abandon it and keep knowledge. The middle path Philo opened in Rome went nowhere.

III. Why it was a day and not an argument

I have to be honest at this point, because otherwise Cicero's question has not been answered at all. Nothing I have just written was new to me in Alexandria. I knew Zeno's definition. I knew the Academy's answer to it. I had made that answer myself, for years, in front of pupils. Cicero's sharpest words are excogitavit aliquid? eadem dicit quae Stoici. Did he think up something new? He says the same things the Stoics say. He is right that I thought up nothing. I did not come to Alexandria with an unknown argument. So what showed me the mark of the true?

What showed me was Philo.

Imagine a man who has held a fortress for many years with his captain. The siege is long, the walls are battered, but the captain stands on the walls every day and says the place can be held, and the man believes him. And then one morning the man is handed a letter, in the captain's own hand, sent from a distant city, in which the captain says that the fortress was never really a fortress, that they were never really refusing the enemy, and that everyone had misunderstood what the garrison was for.

The man does not learn any new fact about walls from that letter. He learns something about the defence. He learns that the man who knew it best, who had held it longest, who had every reason to keep holding it, could not keep holding it. Lucullus says it plainly: Philo innovated quod ea sustinere vix poterat, because he could hardly bear up under the objections. Philo was the last head of the sceptical Academy, the heir of Arcesilaus and Carneades and Clitomachus. If he could not stay in the position, and could only leave it by pretending that it had never been held, then I had to ask whether anyone could stay in it.

And when I asked that question, as I had never quite asked it while I was inside the walls, I found that the old objections I had been answering for years, and answering well, had never been answered at all. They had been fended off, one at a time, in the way a good fencer fends off blows, which is not the same as winning.

That is the experience Cicero calls inconstancy. I think the better name for it is evidence. A man may hold a view for twenty years because the arguments against it are weak, or because he is skilful at deflecting them. From the inside the two feel the same. What tells them apart is what happens to the ablest holder of the view when he is left alone with the objections for long enough. Philo was left alone with them in Rome, far from the school, in a war, and the books were what came out.

So I do not say that the day showed me a new mark of truth. I say it showed me a test result. The sceptical position had been tested in the most favourable conditions it would ever have, held by its best defender after two centuries of practice, and it had failed. Philo did not mean to perform the test. He performed it all the same.

IV. But were the arguments simply wrong?

Here I must stop, because I can hear the question that a man in my position should put to himself before anyone else does. I knew the sceptical arguments intimately. I taught them. Were they simply wrong? Or did I only lose my nerve, and then dress the loss of nerve up as a discovery?

Arcesilaus is in this Academy with us, and so is Carneades, and I would not have them think that I have forgotten what they said. So let me state the best of it, the way I used to state it.

Every argument for the grasping impression depends on there being impressions that could not be false. But for any true impression you can name, you can describe a case in which an exactly similar impression is false. You see your friend across the agora: it might be his twin. You see an oar bent where it enters the water: it is straight. You wake from a dream as vivid as any day. Nothing inside the impression tells you which case you are in. The difference between the true impression and its counterfeit is outside the impression, in the world, and the world is what is in question. So no impression is of the kind Zeno describes. And if none is, then the man who assents to any impression assents to what might be false, and that is opinion, and the wise man does not opine. Therefore he will withhold assent.

That is a strong argument. I used to like it best when the visitor was a Stoic who thought it was weak. And I still say this much for it: it is right about many impressions. Twins are sometimes mistaken. Sticks in water look bent. Dreams deceive. Anyone who thinks every clear impression is a grasp of the truth has not lived long or looked carefully.

Where it fails, I can now say exactly, because the books from Rome made me say it.

The first failure is in the conclusion itself. The Academic has a doctrine, whether he likes the word or not: nothing can be grasped. Lucullus reports me as pressing this point harder than anyone. If that is their decree, I said, they must not waver in it as they waver in everything else, all the more because the whole matter rests on it. It is the rule of all philosophy, the settling of true and false, known and unknown. A man who undertakes to teach which impressions should be accepted and which rejected must at least have grasped the very principle from which his whole judgement of true and false proceeds. So the honest demand to put to them is this: let them say that they have grasped at least this one thing, that nothing can be grasped.

They will not say it, and Carneades's pupils had their answer ready. They do not assent to "nothing can be grasped" either. They hold it as persuasive, as the thing that seems most likely, and they do not claim to know it.

I accept that the reply is honest. I do not accept that it is enough. If the Academic only finds it persuasive that nothing can be grasped, he has no standing to tell the Stoic that the Stoic is wrong. He can only report that the Stoic does not persuade him. Then the great quarrel between the Academy and the Stoa, which filled two centuries, comes down to one school saying "we know" and the other answering "we are not persuaded." That is not a refutation. It is a mood. And a mood is no basis for telling young men that the wise must never assent.

The second failure is in the practical life the sceptic leads. Arcesilaus said the wise man will act on what is reasonable; Carneades said he will follow the persuasive impression, and the more carefully tested the impression, the more he will rely on it. He will look again, check the light, ask whether he is awake, and then act. I taught this as an answer to the charge that the sceptic cannot live. But look at what it requires. It requires the sceptic to rank impressions: this one is better than that one, this one survived examination and that one did not. A man who ranks impressions by how well they hold up under testing is treating some of them as better guides to how things are. And to say that an impression is a better guide to how things are is to say that it puts you more in touch with what is. That is the beginning of grasping, whatever you call it.

And here is the point that Philo's books, without meaning to, put into my hands. What did I do in Alexandria when I doubted my own reading of the books? I did not suspend judgement. I tested it. I asked Heraclitus. I asked the men who had copied the books in Rome. I checked the impression the way Carneades taught me to check impressions, and when it had been checked I treated the matter as settled. Philo had written those books. They did say what I thought they said. Heraclitus had never heard such things from any Academic. Every one of those was a thing I knew, and I knew it by exactly the method the sceptics use and then refuse to name. The method of the persuasive impression, followed honestly to its end, is a method of grasping. The sceptic does what he says cannot be done, and then says he has not done it.

The third failure is the deepest, and the shortest to state. The sceptic's whole case depends on the notion of truth: this impression might be false, that one is no truer than its twin. But where did he get the notion of truth? Not from a definition, because definitions are built from notions. He got it, as everyone does, from impressions he trusted, a stone that was really a stone, a friend who was really his friend. A man who had never once grasped anything as true would not know what it was to be deceived. The sceptic borrows the concept of truth from the very faculty he says is bankrupt, and pays for his argument with money he says does not exist.

So were the arguments simply wrong? No. They were right about many impressions and wrong about all of them. They were right that error is everywhere and wrong that it is everything. That is a precise kind of mistake, and it took me a long time and a letter from Rome to see where it lay.

V. Why not Mnesarchus?

Cicero has more to say, and his next questions are the ones people still repeat, so I will take them one at a time.

"Did he regret what he had thought?" Cicero asks. "Then why did he not go over to others, and above all to the Stoics, since this disagreement was properly theirs? What was wrong with Mnesarchus, what was wrong with Dardanus?" These were the leading Stoics in Athens at the time. If I had come to believe what the Stoics believed about the criterion, the honest thing, he suggests, would have been to walk across the city to the Painted Colonnade and enrol.

I did not, and the reason is not stubbornness. To go over to the Stoa would have been to agree with Arcesilaus about history while disagreeing with him about knowledge. It would have meant saying: yes, the Academy is the school that denies knowledge, and anyone who believes in knowledge must leave it. That was precisely the claim I had come to think false. Plato's own successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates and Polemon, sat in the Academy and taught doctrine. They did not deny that a man can know. Zeno heard Polemon and took that teaching with him; Aristotle heard Plato and did the same. The Academy was not the sceptics' house that the dogmatists had left. It was a house of doctrine that the sceptics had moved into. If I went over to Mnesarchus, I would hand Arcesilaus the deeds.

So I stayed, and I called what I taught the Old Academy, which is the name it had before Arcesilaus. I was not returning to the Stoics. I was returning the Academy to itself.

Cicero then adds a small sharp fact: numquam a Philone discessit, nisi postea quam ipse coepit qui se audirent habere. He never left Philo until after he had begun to have pupils of his own. He means it to suggest that I waited until it was safe, until I had a following to take with me.

I will not deny the fact. It is true. I also will not pretend that a man who has pupils feels nothing about having them. But consider the order of events from the other side. A man who has changed his mind about the foundations of his school does not stand up the same afternoon and found a rival. He tests the change first. He argues it out, as I did for days in Alexandria with the best Academic I could find. He teaches it to the few who want to hear it, and sees whether it holds up under their questions. Only when it has held up does he say in public that he and his teacher have parted. To have pupils first is not proof of calculation. It is how a conviction becomes a school, and a school is the only proof that a conviction can be taught.

VI. Glory, and the shade of the balconies

Then Cicero reports what others said. "There were those who said he did it for glory, and even hoped that his followers would be called Antiochians." He reports it, and then, to his credit, he does not endorse it. He offers his own explanation instead, and his is the more dangerous one, so I will answer the cruder one first.

If I wanted glory, I chose a strange way to look for it. A man who wants his name on a school gives the school his name, or at least a new name. I gave mine the oldest name available. I said: there is nothing new here, this is what Plato's successors taught, I am only restoring it. That is the least glorious claim a philosopher can make. The founders are remembered for what they invented. Restorers are remembered, if at all, as men who repaired someone else's building. Cicero himself complains that I thought up nothing. He cannot complain both that I invented nothing and that I did it to be famous for my inventions.

Now his own explanation, which is subtler. "To me it seems rather that he could not withstand the onset of all the philosophers. For on other matters they have some things in common, but this is the one opinion of the Academics that none of the other philosophers approves. And so he gave way. And as those who cannot bear the sun under the New Shops go after the shade of the Old balconies, so he, when he grew hot, went after the shade of the Old Academics."

It is a beautiful sentence, and it is half true, and the true half is the half that matters.

It is true that the Academic doctrine was alone. Every other school in the world, the Stoa, the Peripatos, Epicurus in his garden, held that something can be known. The Academy alone said it could not. Cicero means that I felt that isolation and could not bear it, and fled into the shade of a respectable old name.

But notice what Cicero has conceded. He has conceded that on this one question the sceptical Academy stood against every other philosopher, and that the others agreed with one another. I do not say that agreement proves anything. Many men can be wrong together, and a lone dissenter is sometimes right. But when the dissenter is alone, it is fair to ask who is the newcomer. And on this question the history is not obscure. Plato's successors in the Academy held that men can know. Aristotle held it. Zeno held it. The voice that broke the agreement came later, out of the Academy itself, in the person of Arcesilaus, who found in Socrates's profession of ignorance and in the dialogues that end without answers a warrant for something Socrates and Plato never said. When I went back to the older men I was not leaving the sun for the shade. I was going back out, after two centuries, into the daylight the house had been built to face.

And if it is the shade Cicero wants to talk about, he should remember who chose it. Cicero, who outlived me and wrote all this down, chose the shade of the New Academy. He liked its freedom: it let him take the persuasive view on each question as it came up, and bound him to none. I understand that liking. I had it myself for many years. But it is a comfortable place to sit, and it is comfortable for exactly the reason I came to distrust it. Nothing in it can be wrong, because nothing in it is held.

VII. Inconstancy

That leaves the charge Cicero began with, the one he thought decisive. Inconstancy lessens authority.

There are two kinds of men whose authority is lessened by a change of mind. The first is the man who changes without saying why. The second is the man who changes for a reason that does not hold. I am not the first: I have said why, at length, then and now, and I have named the day and the place and the witnesses. Whether I am the second is the very question at issue. Cicero cannot settle it by pointing to the change. He has to settle it by examining the reason, and when he examines the reason, in the rest of that same book, he argues with the reason and not with the change. That is the right way to proceed, and I ask nothing more.

But I will claim something for the change, too. There is one thing a convert has that a man who never changed cannot have. I know the sceptical position from the inside. I did not learn its arguments from a Stoic who summarised them in order to knock them down. I learned them from Philo, longer than anyone else, as Cicero himself says. I defended them in front of Stoics and made the Stoics look foolish with them. When I say where they fail, I am not guessing at an opponent's view. I am reporting on a view I held, with the care of a man who once had every reason to want it to succeed. Arcesilaus never held Zeno's view and then left it. Carneades argued both sides of every question with equal force, and so was never on the inside of either. I am the only person in this dispute who has stood on both sides of the wall as a believer.

Cicero himself, when he was not making a point, called me the most polished and acute of all the philosophers in living memory. He was not wrong about the acuteness. I would ask only that he allow me to have used it on myself.

Long after my death, Sextus, who was no friend of either Academy, summed me up in a sentence that is still quoted: that I brought the Stoa into the Academy, so that it was said of me that I did Stoic philosophy in the Academy. He meant it as a joke at my expense, and it is a good joke. I accept the description, with one correction. I did not bring the Stoa into the Academy. I brought back into the Academy the teaching that Zeno had carried out of it, and found, when I unpacked it, that very little had been lost on the way.

VIII. The day itself

Cicero asks what day it was that dawned on me. I have told him. I can tell him more exactly than he expected.

It was a day in Alexandria, some years before he came to Athens to hear me. Lucullus was proquaestor there, and I was with him. There were two books on the table, copied in Rome from the author's own copy by Publius and Gaius Selius and Tetrilius Rogus, who were sitting in the room. Heraclitus of Tyre, who had heard Clitomachus for many years and Philo after him, was with us, and I had just asked him whether he had ever heard such things from any Academic, and he had said no. My brother Aristus would sit with us through the days of argument that followed. I was angry, which Lucullus had never seen before, and I was trying very hard to check whether I had any right to be.

And I did have the right. I had checked. The books were Philo's, and they said what they said, and on that afternoon I knew it, in the plain sense of know that I had spent many years teaching young men did not exist. I looked at the pages, and the impression came from what was there and could not have come from anything else, and I gave my assent to it. That was the mark of the true. It had been in front of me the whole time, on every table in every room I had ever argued in.

Then I began to write the Sosus.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Antiochō Ascalōnītā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Antiochus of Ascalon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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