Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

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selves, and are not, as Epicurus said, dispersed like smoke when released from their
bodies. For before that it was not the body that was in control of them, but it was
they that were the cause of the body’s conjoined existence and, much more, of their
own. For having quitted the sphere of the sun they inhabit the region below
the moon, and there, because of the pureness of the air, they continue to
remain for a long time, and for their sustenance they use the exhalation
which rises from the earth, as do the rest of the stars, and in those regions
they have nothing to dissolve them. If, then, souls persist, they are the same as
demons (da_losim aR aqta_); and if demons exist, one must declare also that
gods exist, their existence being in no wise hindered by the preconception
about the legendary doings in Hades.
The philosophical considerations here adduced are of a physical nature:
the whole idea of pneumatic spirits moving downwards, towards Hades,
is just silly: their natural place is above, and from the sphere of the sun
they descend to the region below the moon. They can persist, because
they do not need the body for their coherence, and they are nourished,
as are the divine heavenly bodies, by exhalations from the earth. In their
new rarified habitat, moreover, there is nothing that can destroy them.
If souls continue to exist in this way “they become identical to demons”
(da_losim aR aqta· c_momtai) – no doubt an oblique reference to the fact
that the Stoics strictly speaking referred to surviving human souls as hÞroes
rather than daimones, on which more in the next section.
One of the interesting aspects of this text is that it provides some sort
of context for the early Stoic ideas concerning an afterlife of the soul:
they were at least in part developed in the context of a polemical discussion
with the Epicureans. 34 Epicurus and his followers believed that the
soul needs the body for its coherence. Epicurus himself stresses the functional
interdependence of soul and body in the Letter to Herodotus:
It is impossible to think of the soul perceiving while not in this organism,
and moving with these motions when what contains and surrounds it are
not of the same kind as those in which it now has these motions. 35
Lucretius faithfully followed in Epicurus’ footsteps. In the course of his
long list of arguments for the mortality of the soul in De rerum natura III,
he repeatedly stresses that the body serves as a vessel (vas) to the soul, and
that when this vessel is broken, or becomes porous, the soul will disperse
34 We know that both Chrysippus and Posidonius were engaged in lively polemics
against Epicureanism as the most important rival system: see e.g. Plutarch, St.
rep. 1054b (SVF II, 539) and Eusebius, PE 261a (SVF II, 978) on Chrysippus,
and Cicero, N.D. I, 123 (fr. 22a EK) on Posidonius.
35 Epicurus, Ep. I, 66.