STILPO, a celebrated philosopher of Megara, flourished under the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes. In his youth he had been addicted to licentious pleasures, from which he religiously refrained from the moment that he ranked himself among philosophers. When Ptolemy Soter, at the taking of Megara, offered him a large sum of money, and requested that he would accompany him into Egypt, he accepted but a small part of the offer, and retired to the island of Ægina, whence, on Ptolemy's departure, he returned to Megara. That city being again taken by Demetrius the son of Antigonus, and the philosopher required to give an account of any effects which he had lost during the hurry of the plunder, he replied, that he had lost nothing; for no one could take from him his learning and eloquence. So great was the fame of Stilpo, that the most eminent philosophers of Athens took pleasure in attending upon his discourses. His peculiar doctrines were, that species or universals have no real existence, and that one thing cannot be predicated of another. With respect to the former of these opinions, he seems to have taught the same doctrine with the sect afterwards known by the appellation of Nominalists. To prove that one thing cannot be predicated of another, he said, that goodness and man, for instance, are different things, which cannot be confounded by afflicting the one to be the other; he argued farther, that goodness is an universal, and universals have no real existence; consequently, since nothing cannot be predicated of any thing, goods cannot be predicated of man. Thus, whilst this subtle logician was, through his whole argument, predicating one thing of another, he denied that any one thing could be the accident or predicate of another.

If Stilpo was serious in this reasoning; if he meant anything more than to expose the sophistry of the schools, he must be confessed to have been an eminent master of the art of wrangling; and it was not wholly without reason that Glycera, a celebrated courtezane, when she was reproved by him as a corrupter of youth, replied, that the charge might be justly retorted upon herself, who spent her time in filling their heads with sophistical quibbles and useless subtleties. In ethics he seems to have been a Stoic, and in religion he had a public and a private doctrine, the former for the multitude, and the latter for his friends. He admitted the existence of a supreme divinity, but had no reverence for the Grecian superstitions.