 Many different philosophical antecedents have been claimed for Pyrrho. Since we know very little about which philosophical currents Pyrrho may have been acquainted with, such claims are bound to be in large measure speculative. There are, however, a couple of exceptions to this; as noted at the outset, Pyrrho was associated with Anaxarchus and was reported to have encountered some unnamed Indian thinkers. The little that we know of Anaxarchus seems to suggest that his philosophy had a good deal in common with Pyrrho’s. Diogenes Laertius (9.60) ascribes to him an attitude of apatheia and eukolia, ‘freedom from emotion’ and ‘contentedness’; as noted earlier, apatheia is used in some sources to describe Pyrrho’s attitude as well, and the combination of the two terms seems to describe something close to the state cultivated by Pyrrho. We also hear from Sextus Empiricus that Anaxarchus “likened existing things to stage-painting and took them to be similar to the things which strike us while asleep or insane” (M 7.88). This has often been taken as an early expression of a form of epistemological scepticism. But it may also be taken as an ontological comment on the insubstantiality of the world around us; it is things (as opposed to our impressions of things) that are assimilated to stage-sets and the contents of dreams and fantasies. Either way, the remark looks like an anticipation of the position expounded in the Aristocles passage; the first reading conforms to the epistemological interpretation of that passage, and the second to the metaphysical interpretation. It appears, then, that Pyrrho may have borrowed to a considerable extent from Anaxarchus, especially if the Aristocles passage as a whole represents Pyrrho’s thought.