Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 363
road he has chosen (R. 617e; 620d, see also Phd. 107d). Hesiod
(Op. 122) assigns a similar function to demons that are of human origin.
The souls of the first generation of man, the Golden Race, live on as
good demons: “they are called pure and good demons who roam
over the earth, keeping off evil, guardians of mortal men” (to· l³m da_-
lomer "cmo· 1piwh|mioi jak]omtai 1shko_, !ken_jajoi, v}kajer hmgt_m
!mhq~pym). They become guardian angels of a kind, in other words,
though, it appears, not on a one-to-one basis. Plato refers back to this
passage in the Cratylus (398b): “Hesiod and many other poets rightly
testify that after death a good man will be accorded an important destiny
and a great honour and that he will become a demon …” Yet other demons
were thought to follow humans not as guardians but as a kind of
spiritual police force or as avenging spirits. 10 A notable example of the
latter are the Erinyes. Policing also appears to be the job of a type of demons
recognized by Hesiod as well (Op. 252–255), who “keep watch
on judgements and on evil deeds, in mist apparrelled and roaming over
the earth”. 11
We may now turn to some more philosophical conceptions of demons.
Heraclitus fr. B 119, which claims that “a man’s character/habitus
is his demon” (Ghor !mhq~pyi da_lym), may be interpreted as offering
an implicit critique of, and an internalizing alternative to, the kind of
traditional conceptions of external helping demons we have just reviewed.
This would be consistent with the critique and re-interpretation
of traditional religion which we find elsewhere in the remaining
fragments. 12 At any rate, what we have here appears to be the first occurrence
of the philosophical conception of an internal demon. From
Heraclitus onward this notion of an internal god, or of the divinity of
(the rational part of) the soul became wide-spread among philosophers.
We find it applied by Socrates in Xenophon (Mem. IV, 3, 14), and by
Plato (R. 589e; Ti. 90a) and Aristotle (EN 1177a13). 13
Finally, in the Platonic tradition, starting with the myth-like representation
of erôs in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, we find yet
another philosophical use of the notion of a demon, viz. as an interme-
10 Some examples: Aeschylus, Ch. 1048–62 and Pers. 601; Euripides, Med. 1389;
Empedocles fr. B 115, 5 and 13; Plato, R. 469b; 540c.
11 Hesiod, Op. 252 – 255: tq·r c±ql}qio_ eQsim 1p· whom· poukubote_q,/!h\matoi
Fgm¹r v}kajer hmgt_m !mhq~pym,/oV Na vuk\ssous_m te d_jar ja· sw]tkia
5qca/A]qa 2ss\lemoi, p\mtg voit_mter 1p’ aWam.
12 On Heraclitus and religion see Osborne 1997 and Adomenas 1999.
13 A useful collection of material is to be found in Haussleiter 1957.