Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

374
Keimpe Algra
we find the claim that the traditional Egyptian stories about what happened
(pah^lata) to Isis, Osiris and Typhon should be interpreted not
as being about gods, nor, in the Euhemeristic fashion, about a man, or
mankind, but as stories about ‘large demons’:
Better, therefore, is the judgement of those who hold that the stories about
Typhon, Osiris and Isis are the records of experiences of neither gods nor
men, but of large demons, whom Plato and Pythagoras and Xenocrates and
Chrysippus, following the lead of early writers on sacred subjects (to?r
p\kai heok|coir, i.e. the tradition), allege to have been stronger than
men and, in their might, greatly surpassing our nature, yet not possessing
the divine quality unmixed and uncontaminated, but with a share also in
the nature of the soul and in the perceptive faculties of the body, and
with a susceptibility to pleasure and pain and to whatsoever other experience
is incident to these mutations, and is the source of much disquiet in
some and of less in others. 45
A few explanatory observations on this text will be in order. First of all,
the practice of explaining those elements in the religious tradition that
seem to be at odds with the supposed nature of the gods – such as festivals
involving lamentation (which applies to the case of Isis) or obscenities
or even human sacrifice – by assuming that they have been instigated
not as being offered to gods, but to demons, goes back to Xenocrates
(echoed by Plutarch, De Is. 316b; Def. or. 417c). 46 Yet apart from this
passage in Plutarch, there is no trace of such a belief in the remaining
evidence on Stoicism. Moreover, as Daniel Babut has shown, the way
in which the ‘large demons’ are described by Plutarch – in particular
the fact that they are said to partake of both the ‘psychic’ and the corporeal,
being for this reason subject to affections – is tinged with the dualism
which is typical of the Middle Platonism of Plutarch and others,
but which in this form is alien to Stoicism. 47 Plutarch introduces demons
as a possible explanation of a particular phenomenon, and simply sup-
45 Plutarch, De Is. 360e (SVF II, 1103); Babbitt’s Loeb translation with some
slight changes.
46 Unlike Plutarch, Xenocrates appears to have been thinking primarily of evil demons
and of straightforwardly evil religious practices.
47 On the demonology of the De Iside and the way it relates to the Stoic position
see the useful and sound overview of Babut 1969, 397 – 402. Pohlenz 1947, 96,
on the other hand, appears to have been too uncritical in taking over Plutarch’s
description of demons as intermediary entities as reflecting an essential feature
of the Stoic conception: “Sie sind Mittelwesen, den Menschen an Kraft überlegen,
aber schon in die Sinnlichkeit verstrickt und für Lust und Schmerz zugänglich”.