Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Empedocles and metempsychôsis: The critique of Diogenes of Oenoanda 81
gemonikon) 10 respects this tendency. In Latin the trend continues, with
the enriching complication that animus and anima are both available
for use, so that some disambiguation of soul in the sense of moral intellectual
personality (animus) and soul in the sense of life force (anima) is
possible; this we see in Lucretius, in Cicero and in Seneca.
Empedocles seems to have used the word psychÞ for life force
alone. 11 It is as certain as such things can be that Diogenes includes Empedocles’
theory of transmigration in his discussion of psychÞ because of
the assimilation of Empedocles to the tradition, probably beginning
with Pythagoras, of referring to the bearer of identity across different
embodiments as a psychÞ. This early tradition treated the psychÞ as a subject
of transmigration to other animal species – Xenophanes lampoons
this no doubt Pythagorean idea in fragment 7 (DK = D.L. 8.36). 12
Much of the rest of the evidence for the early Pythagoreans runs
some risk of such contamination from the later tradition, but this critique
seems to secure the notion as being known in sixth century
Ionia, at least. Similarly, it is obvious that Heraclitus made the term
into a kind of focus for moral accountability (anticipating the Socratic
change that so influenced Plato). 13 But nevertheless this was not something
Empedocles accepted from or shared with his Ionian predecessors,
at least not on the direct evidence of the poem as we now can reconstruct
it.
And this tells us one thing, at least, about Diogenes: that he was in
this respect a captive of his tradition. Although he must have had access
to Empedocles’ poetry and attended to its details (as the verbal echo of
fr. 115 shows), he saw it exclusively through this assimilationist tradition.
But that was already very likely, just given the ubiquity of the tendency
to group together Pythagoreans, Platonists, and their various followers
(Empedocles and Orphics with Pythagoras; the Stoics and Aristotle
with Platonists – though Zeno of Citium is credited at Diogenes
Laërtius 7.4 with a work entitled Pythagorean matters, so it is possible
10 Note that the term xuw is used in the discussion of the survival of the soul (of
the sage, as Chrysippus held, or of all rational agents, according to Cleanthes),
while it is clear that only the rational part (Bcelomijºm) actually remains coherent
after death. See SVF 2.809 – 822, esp. 809 = Eusebius, PE 15.20.6 = LS 53W,
810 = Aëtius 4.7.3, 811 = D.L. 7.157. See also Long 1982, esp. 40 – 41 and 52.
11 If he used the word at all. Picot (2004, 2005, 2006) has argued that fr. 138 DK is
not Empedoclean.
12 Cf. Herodotus 2.123, though the thinkers referred to there are not named.
13 See Nussbaum 1972.