Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 371
for lack of anything else to keep it together. 36 Sextus’ Stoics now reply
by claiming that it is the other way round: the soul gives coherence to
the body, as well as to itself. Accordingly, although the disintegration of
the body suggests that the soul is no longer in the body, it does not preclude
the possibility that the soul keeps its own coherence and survives
elsewhere.
Further evidence shows, however, that the early Stoics were divided
when it came to the details of the theory, which may have contributed
to the apparent scepticism of later Stoics, to which I will turn in the final
section of this paper. There was general agreement that survival did not
imply eternity and that surviving human souls could last at most until
the next conflagration. But as to who exactly would survive and for
how long, there was disagreement. Diogenes Laertius tells us that
Chrysippus believed only the souls of the virtuous would live on
until the next conflagration, whereas Cleanthes accorded this prospect
to all souls. 37 The common Stoic account provided by Arius Didymus
shows that, as was often the case, it was Chrysippus’ view that carried
the day: “The soul, they say, comes to be and is perishable. Yet it
does not perish immediately on leaving the body, but remains for
some time on its own: the soul of the sages until the dissolution of everything
into fire, the soul of the fools for some time.” 38 Why this difference
between the fate of the good and that of the rest? As we just
saw, Sextus’ account connects the question of survival with the cohesive
force of the soul. And as we noted in the previous section, the Stoics
associated virtue and vice at a physical level with different degrees of
pneumatic tension (tonos) of the soul. 39 Together these considerations
suggest that the different fates of virtuous and non-virtuous souls after
death were somehow thought to be connected with their different
tonos-structure. This seems to be confirmed by a second doxographical
report in Aëtius: “The Stoics claim that the soul, on leaving the body,
does not perish at once. The weaker soul becomes a weak structure (that
36 On the relation of soul and body in general, see Lucretius III, 323–416. On the
body as container (vas), see III, 440 and 455.
37 D.L. VII, 157 (SVF I, 528; II, 811): Jke\mhgr l³m owmp\sar 1pidial]meim l]wqi
t/r 1jpuq~seyr, Wqus_ppor d³ t±r t_msov_m l|mom.
38 Arius Didymus fr. 39 Diels (SVF II, 809): tµm d³xuwµm cemet^m te ja· vhaqtµm
k]cousim. oqj eqh»rd³toO s~lator !pakkace?sam vhe_qeshai, !kk’ 1pil]meim
tim±r wq|mour jah’ 2aut^m tµm l³mt_mspouda_ym l]wqi t/r eQrpOq!mak}seyr
t_m p\mtym, tµm d³t_m!vq|moym pq¹r timar wq|mour.
39 See above, 369.