Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 375
ports this with a list of philosophers who were committed to the existence
of demons. Chrysippus figures on this list, but one cannot eo
ipso ascribe the rest of the information provided by Plutarch to him. Accordingly
there is no reason to assume that Chrysippus interpreted the
Egyptian myths the way Plutarch suggests, nor that he saw demons in
the Platonic fashion as intermediary entities between the psychic and
the somatic or between the divine and the human level.
We move on to Sextus, who offers an example of an argument for
the existence of external demons next to some information about their
possible role:
Also, if there exist on the earth and in the sea, which have very dense parts,
a variety of living beings which share in the faculties of soul and of sense, it
is much more probable that there exist in the air (which, as compared with
earth and water, is very clear and pure) some living beings endowed with
soul and intelligence. And in accord with this is the saying that the Dioskouroi
are good demons, ‘saviours of the well-benched ships’, and that
‘Zeus over mortal men, upon earth the sustainer of many, thrice ten thousand
guardians has set, [divine and] immortal’. 48
We are first given an argument from plausibility for the very existence
of demons in the sublunar region, i. e. in the air. If there are animals
sharing the faculties of soul and sense on the earth and in the sea, it is
much more probable that such ensouled creatures exist in the air. The
context in Sextus strongly suggests that we are dealing with an argument
of Stoic provenance; and in fact we find a similar, though not identical,
type of argument in the Stoic account in Cicero, N.D. II, 42. 49 Yet the
argument seems to go back to the early Platonic tradition: we find it in
the pseudo-Platonic Epinomis, now usually attributed to the early Academic
Philippus of Opus, and it recurs in Philo, Alcinous and Apuleius.
50 This reveals a certain common ground between Platonic and
early Stoic demonology which is not surprising, given the early Stoics’
debt to the early Academy. It is this common ground which presumably
allowed doxographers, but also Plutarch, to lump together Chrysippus,
48 Sextus, M. IX, 86 (SVF II, 1014). The quotation is from Hesiod Op. 252, also
quoted above, n. 11.
49 In Cicero’s account the argument is meant to show the plausibility of there
being living beings in the fiery region of the heavens; that there are living beings
on earth, in water, and in the air, is being assumed as given. See for a similar
version of the argument Aristotle GA III, 761b16 ff.
50 See ps.-Plato, Epin. 984b ff. (significantly altering Plato’s account of Ti. 92b);
Philo, Gig. 6 – 8; Alcinous, Didasc. 15; and Apuleius, De deo Socratis, ch. 8.