Apologistswork
Who he was
- A collection of pagan moral sentences and rules of life, which were attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher Sextus.
- Platonic ideas regarding purification, illumination and deification, and the Platonic concept of God inspire the majority of these sayings.
- Rufinus translated 451 of the sayings from Greek into Latin.
What he wrote
- Origen is the first to mention them in his Contra Celsum (8, 30). He recalls a beautiful saying in the writings of Sextus: “The eating of animals,” says he, “is a matter of indifference; but to abstain from them is more agreeable to reason.”
- At the end of the 2nd century, a Christian author revised the sayings.