 But there are many other anecdotes, preserved in Diogenes and elsewhere, that cannot be dismissed in this fashion. The dominant impression they convey as a group is of an extraordinary impassivity or imperturbability; with rare exceptions (which he himself is portrayed as regretting), Pyrrho is depicted as maintaining his calm and untroubled attitude no matter what happens to him. (The exceptions have led Pyrrho’s outlook to be labeled “aspirationalism”; see Ribeiro (2022). But while his attainment of tranquility was admittedly not perfect, the picture we get is of someone who was truly exceptional in this respect.) This extends even to extreme physical pain—he is reported not to have flinched when subjected to the horrific techniques of ancient surgery—but it also encompasses dangers such as being on a ship in a storm. (This is not to say that he did not avoid such troubles if he could, as suggested by the apocryphal stories mentioned in the previous paragraph; it is just to say that he did not lose his composure in the face of life’s inevitable hardships.) There is another aspect to this untroubled attitude as well. In numerous anecdotes Pyrrho is shown as unconcerned with adhering to the normal conventions of society; he wanders off for days on end by himself, and he performs tasks that would normally be left to social inferiors, such as housework and even washing a pig. Here, too, the suggestion is that he does not care about things that ordinary people do care about — in this case, the disapproval of others. (The passage from Diogenes quoted in the previous section, according to which Pyrrho held “that human beings do everything by convention and habit” is not necessarily in conflict with this; by ‘human beings’ Pyrrho might have meant ordinary human beings, among whom he would not have included himself.)