Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

360
Keimpe Algra
curs, as the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus puts it, ex fixo et immutabili naturae
ordine. 2
However, the analogy with Spinoza may mislead, since it overlooks
some crucial differences. Spinoza conceived of his philosophy as a radically
new and methodologically innovative way of dealing with the
world. The Stoics – however radical their philosophy, particularly
their ethics, may have been in some respects – were at the same time
eager to establish some sort of connection with the preceding religious
and mythical traditions of the Greeks. The edifice of Greek religion and
myth, or so they appear to have believed, was in the end inferior in
clarity and soundness to (Stoic) philosophy. Yet it contained kernels
of truth which owed their existence to the fact that the people of
old, even if they had had to do without a fully-fledged philosophy,
had possessed ‘natural concepts’ or ‘preconceptions’ of isolated notions
such as ‘god’. 3 This is not to say that the Stoics were the straightforward
religious conservatives they have sometimes been taken to have been.
They were in general rather selective in what they took over from
the tradition, accepting only those elements – concepts, myths, aspects
of cult – which they could somehow ‘appropriate’ and integrate into
their physical and theological world view. 4 To a certain extent, in
other words, they tried to rationalize the irrational, or as they would
think of it themselves: to further rationalize and systematize the partially
rational aspects of the tradition. This general attitude was most famously
exemplified by their willingness to describe, or rather re-describe, part
of the traditional Greek pantheon as parts or aspects of the single cosmic
deity whose existence was taken to be proved by their philosophy. 5
In the present paper I propose to investigate whether and to what
extent anything like an appropriation of parts or aspects of traditional
demonology was effected in Stoicism. I shall chart the (relatively
under-researched) evidence, reconstruct the outlines of the underlying
theory, and signal some problems and developments. I shall begin (section
2) by offering a brief survey of the various conceptions of demons
2 See Israel 2001, esp. 375–405.
3 See Algra 2007a, 12 –17.
4 For the Greek and Latin equivalents of the verb ‘to appropriate’, see Philodemus,
Piet. PHerc. 1428, col. vi, 16 – 26 (sumoijeioOm) and Cicero, N.D. I, 41 (accomodare).
5 For Stoic philosophical interpretations of the early poets see Long 1992a and
Algra 2001. For Stoic attitudes vis-à-vis the religious tradition in general, see
Algra 2007a.