Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 361
that were around in the pre-Gellenistic religious and philosophical traditions,
and of the various functions assigned to them. I shall then examine
the way in which the Stoics adopted and incorporated elements
from this tradition (sections 3–6) and the extent to which their attitude
changed in the course of the history of the school (section 7).
I have already indicated that the evidence on Stoic demonology is
scarce and scattered. We know that Posidonius wrote a work On Heroes
and Demons, and that Chrysippus discussed a number of related issues in
various works, for example in his On Visions in Sleep and, at least in passing,
in his On Substance. For information on the contents of the Stoic
theory, however, we are to a large extent dependent on the relatively
late and indirect information provided by the testimonies of Arius Didymus,
Aëtius, Diogenes Laertius, and Sextus Empiricus, which are
often very scrappy. The additional evidence provided by Plutarch involves
problems of its own in so far as he sometimes appears to gloss
over the differences between the Stoic theory and the demonology of
the Platonic tradition with which he was more familiar. 6 As a result
not everything he says about the Stoics in this connection can be
taken at face value. All this means that part of our work will consist
in an assessment of the nature and value of our sources and of the limitations
they set to any attempt to reconstruct the Stoic theory. Section
6, for example, will be entirely devoted to an analysis of the value of
three pieces of evidence offered by Plutarch.
2. Demons in earlier Greek thought
It will be appropriate to begin with a brief survey of the traditional conception
or conceptions of demons that were around when the Stoics entered
the stage. Probably no typology of demons in traditional Greek
thought exactly covers the variety of phenomena, traditions and beliefs
current throughout the centuries. Yet, on the basis of the material collected
by others, 7 we may draw the following generalizing sketch of
early Greek conceptions of demons. As for their nature, demons
could be thought of either as beings of non-human origin or as surviv-
6 Whether he was positively committed to such a demonology is yet another
issue – one, moreover which has proved controversial; see below, n. 16.
7 A lot of valuable material has been collected in Haussleiter 1957; Vrugt-Lenz
1976 and Zintzen 1976.