Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoics on souls and demons: Reconstructing Stoic demonology 387
All in all, then, one gets the impression that Stoic cosmo-theology
could very well do without the assumption of external demons, whereas
the arguments adduced in support of their existence were rather weak
and unconvincing. Such considerations may have helped to bring
about the change of attitude which we appear to witness among the Stoics
of the Imperial period. Apart from ubiquitous references to the ‘internal
demon’, demonology appears to have disappeared from the stage.
In principle this could be due to the fact that the surviving works from
this period predominantly deal with ethical questions. The strong focus
on virtue and what is ‘up to us’, which is typical of these later Stoics
would have made the concept of the internal demon a more appealing
one to write about. But there seems to be more to it. Seneca, as we saw,
explicitly rejects, or at least refuses to seriously discuss, the conception of
an external demon. Moreover, these later Stoics are known to have
been relatively sceptical in so far as matters to do with the afterlife of
the human soul are concerned. Seneca comes up with various views
in different contexts; the other two seem to have grave doubts at the
least, with Epictetus apparently preferring the view that our self disappears
and that we return to the physical elements. 73 Seneca actually
seems to believe that such questions are beyond what can be safely established
in physics, to judge from what he has to say about the human
soul in general, viz. that its nature, place and source are unknown to
us. 74 The slightly paradoxical conclusion, then, seems to be that whereas
the great physicists of the Stoic tradition, Chrysippus and Posidonius,
apparently went to great lengths to accommodate a serious form of demonology
into their cosmo-theology, the great moralists of the imperial
period took what not only anachronistically and by hindsight, but also
within the context of Stoicism itself, could be regarded as the more enlightened
view.
73 See Arr. Epict. III, 13, 14 – 15. On the various views throughout the history of
Stoicism on the possibility of an afterlife for the human soul see Hoven 1971.
74 Seneca, Ep. CXXI, 12: nos quoque animum habere nos scimus; quid sit animus,
qualis sit aut unde nescimus. See also Nat. VII, 25, 2.