Carneades' Quip: Orality, Philosophy, Wit, and the Poetics of Impromptu Quotation

In spite of a long and influential philosophical career, when Carneades of Cyrene (214-129 BC), head of the Academy in its skeptical phase, died at age eighty-five, he left behind no written works. There were, we are told, some letters extant in Diogenes Laertius' time addressed to Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia, but Carneades' philosophical opinions were conveyed orally and transmitted to posterity in written form only by his students (D.L. 4.65).1 In this respect Carneades resembles not only Pythagoras and Socrates before him and Epictetus later, but also his Skeptic predecessors Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, whose refusal to commit their ideas to writing was a conscious protest against philosophical dogmatism.2