Library › Greek: Philosophy › Testimonia
This page presents the single ancient testimony for Basilides, a Stoic philosopher of whom little is known. It is a report by Sextus Empiricus, in his work Against the Professors (8.258), that some Stoics, namely Basilides and his followers, rejected the existence of lekta, the incorporeal 'sayables' or meanings expressed by statements, because they held that nothing at all is incorporeal. No writings of his survive.
The report is significant because it shows disagreement within the Stoic school on a central point of its logic and physics. Most Stoics accepted a small class of incorporeals, including lekta, void, place and time, and Basilides' denial shows that this doctrine was debated. He is distinct from Basilides the Gnostic.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SVF III p. 268). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).