Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 377
surviving human souls, and Posidonius to demons in general, concerned
divination. A passage in Cicero’s De divinatione most probably derives
from Chrysippus’ On Visions in Sleep (Peq· 1mupm_ym). 53 The story offered
by Cicero goes as follows. Two friends went to Megara; the
one put up at an inn, the other went to a local friend’s house. In the
middle of the night the latter got a dream in which his companion
told him that he was about to be killed by the innkeeper. On closer consideration
he thought nothing of the dream and went to bed. But then
his friend appeared again, begging him that, although he had ignored his
cry for help while he was still alive, he should at least not allow his dead
body to go unburied. He gave directions as to where it was hidden. In
the morning the friend discovered the body and the perpetrator was
punished. Like Chrysippus’ On Visions in Sleep, also Posidonius appears
to have connected demons with divination. We have Cicero’s paraphrase
of his account of three forms of divination in sleep (Div. I, 64
= fr. 108 EK), which may well come from the book On Heroes and Demons.
According to Cicero’s Posidonius this kind of divination may take
place:
(1) through what the soul itself foresees, inasmuch as it is imbued with
kinship with the gods; or
(2) through what is provided by spirits of which the air is replete (plenus
immortalium animorum); or
(3) through what is conferred directly by god or gods themselves.
According to Cicero these three categories represent three ways in
which our self can be influenced by the divine (deorum adpulso): through
our internal demon and its kinship with the cosmic god; through external
demons; and directly by god himself. Various elements in this testimony
remain problematic – thus one wonders whether the reference to
immortal spirits can be correct (it may be due to Cicero rather than to
Posidonius’ original text), and the relation between (1) and (3) remains
rather unclear 54 – but the description of the second type of divination
must be referring to the role of external demons.
53 See the parallel version in the Suidas (SVF II, 1205) which is explicitly ascribed
to Chrysippus; and the remark in Cicero, Div. II, 144 (SVF II, 1206) that
Chrysippus’ book was full of such stories.
54 For some details see the commentary in Kidd 1988, 428–432.