Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

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Brad Inwood
that Stoics entered the amalgam by two routes). 14 This tendency is visible
even in our shattered fragments of the inscription, since the Stoics
seem to be dealt with primarily as philosophers who started from a
broadly Platonic position but ruined it by ill-considered and under-motivated
innovations, a view of the Stoic contribution to the issue that
might well have been welcomed by Antiochus of Ascalon.
Is this blending together of various schools and viewpoints typical of
Epicurean critics? To some extent we see a similar approach in the
nameless critique mounted by Lucretius and it seems to me likely
enough that Epicureans great and petty may well have taken the
broad brush in hand when it came to defending their school against critics
who for their part seldom troubled themselves to develop a thorough
understanding of the Epicurean theory they were rejecting. And the
tendency to assimilate Pythagorean (including Empedocles on many issues),
Platonist, and Stoic positions into a single blend was common
enough in the Imperial period even outside Epicurean polemics. So
what we learn about Diogenes on this point is limited though not unimportant:
he was typical of his day.
A more significant question is whether intellectual harm was done
by this kind of blending. Does it matter, in other words, that Empedocles
used a different word for the transmigrating bearer of identity than
did Plato and the critics? And that his critics attacked his views under
the label psychÞ rather than daimôn. In itself, one might think that it
does not, at least not if one stays at a sufficiently general level in the articulation
of the theory and in the criticism of it. For instance, if the key
issue under attack turns on problems with the continuity of personal
identity across different lives, then whether the bearer of that identity
is called a daimôn or a psychÞ probably matters little, certainly less than
the question whether this identity bearer is material or not.
However, there are two related issues we can raise which do make
the assimilation of daimôn to psychÞ significant. First, if Primavesi is right
to suggest that the daimôn whose wanderings are described in Empedoclean
poetry is not in fact the sort of thing referred to elsewhere as a
soul, if it is in fact a god rather than a normal human identity and if
it is a wholly distinct kind of entity from ordinary humans, then the en-
14 At Aëtius 1.8.2 = SVF 2.1101 the doxographer groups together Thales, Pythagoras,
Plato and the Stoics on the topic of souls and daimons. Similarly, Plutarch
at De def. 419a = SVF 2.1104 Empedocles, Plato, Xenocrates, Chrysippus and
Democritus are grouped together as believing in bad daimons.