What Kind of Self Can a Greek Sceptic Have?

I have always had difficulty understanding talk about the self; precisely what is being referred to by the term has always seemed to me elusive. And so, in beginning work on this paper, I did what I do not generally encourage my students to do; I looked up the word in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following overlapping series of definitions: “That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness”. Even aside from the sexism of the first definition, this set of definitions has a very archaic ring to it; it is perhaps no surprise that, although it was the 1971 edition that I consulted, the most recent of the examples of the word’s usage that followed the definitions was from 1909. For the claim that there is some group of features that constitute the real or intrinsic character, or the essence, of a person; the notion of a strong form of personal identity inhering solely in psychological, and not at all in physical, features of a person; and the suggestion that there is any such thing as “a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness” — all these ideas have been the objects of severe and widespread philosophical suspicion for a long time (indeed, since long before 1909, one of their most vocal detractors being Hume). If that is what is meant by the self, it might well seem that the question whether an ancient Greek sceptic can lay claim to such a thing is of no great interest. If that is what the self is supposed to be, one might say, then of course no ancient Greek sceptic would want such a thing; but this creates no problem for sceptics in particular, since we all manage quite satisfactorily without it.