[51] S.E., M. ix, 71–3. The naive but quite plain statements go back to Poseid. as has often been pointed out (e.g. by Corssen, de Pos. Rhod., p. 45, 1878, and others). So, too, do the similar remarks in Cic., TD. i, 42. Poseid. does not appear to be uttering heterodox opinions in this case, so far as we can see.
[52] —καὶ γὰρ οὐδὲ τὰς ψυχὰς ἔνεστιν ὑπονοῆσαι κάτω φερομένας. λεπτομερεῖς γὰρ οὖσαι εἰς τοὺς ἄνω μᾶλλον τόπους κουφοφοροῦσιν, S.E., M. ix, 71. This physical reason was in itself enough to make it impossible for the Stoics to believe in a subterranean region of the souls: οὐδεὶς Ἅιδης, οὐδ’ Ἀχέρων, οὐδὲ Κωκυτός κτλ., Epict. iii, 13, 15. It is the regular Stoic doctrine: see Bonhöffer, Epikt. 56 f.; cf. Cic., TD. i, 36 f.; Sen., C. ad Marc. 19, 4. When Stoics speak occasionally of inferi or ᾅδης as the abode of the souls, they are only using metaphorical language. When the word is not a mere conventionalism, they mean the regions nearer the earth, the cloud regions and lower levels of the air, ὁ παχυμερέστατος καὶ προσγειότατος ἀήρ (Corn., ND. 5, p. 4, 17 L; other exx. in Heinze, Xenokr. 147, 2). Here the “unwise” souls (the moister, less buoyant ones) are supposed to remain after death (circa terram as Tert., An. 54 says, alluding to Stoic doctrine—and this is obviously where the inferi mentioned at the end of the same chapter are situated). This ἀήρ (distinguished from the higher regions of the air) = ᾅδης, must have been what Zeno referred to when he spoke of the loca tenebrosa where the souls of the unwise have to expiate their folly (quoted and varied by Lact., Inst. 7, 7, 13, in a Platonic sense [i, 40 Arn.]).
[53] Abode of the souls in the air: S. E., M. ix, 73; Cic., TD. i, 42–3, both probably after Poseid. Cf. sapientum animas in supernis mansionibus collocant (Stoici), Tert., An., 54. Generally: εἰς τὸν ἀέρα μεθίστασθαι said of the departed souls, M. Ant. iv, 21. ἐν τῷ περιέχοντι . . . διαμένειν τὰς τῶν ἀποθανόντων ψυχάς, Ar. Did. ap. Eus., PE. xv, 822 A [ii, 225 Arn.]. (Gradual ascent to ever higher regions, Sen., C. ad Marc. 25, 1—hardly orthodox Stoic doctrine).—The conception may possibly belong to the older Stoicism, and may underlie the opinion of Chrysipp.: σφαιροειδεῖς—as fiery μετέωρα—τὰς ψυχὰς [517] μετὰ θάνατον γίνεσθαι, ap. Eust., Il. 1288, 10 f. [224 Arn.]. Poseid. seems to have worked it out further, probably making use also of Pythagorean and Platonic fancies to which he was distinctly inclined. The Pythagoreans had fancies about the souls hovering in the air (see above, chap. xi, [n. 35]), of the sun and moon as places where the souls lived (chap. x, [n. 76]). Acc. to Poseid. the souls inhabit τὸν ὑπὸ σελήνην τόπον (S.E., M. ix, 73) as suitable for divine but not perfect creatures. It is the souls who are meant when people speak of δαίμονες (S.E. § 74), or ἥρωες (Stoic in this use D.L. vi, 151 [ii, 320 Arn.]); cf. heroes et lares et genii, Varro using Stoic language (ap. Aug., CD. vii, 6, p. 282, 14 Domb.). The whole air is full of them: Pos. ap. Cic., Div. i, 64. Something very similar given as Pythag. doctrine by Alex. Polyh. ap. D.L. viii, 32; see above, chap. xi, [n. 35]. But Poseidonios (esp. if he is really the source of the Ciceronian Somn. Scip.) seems to have emulated more particularly the imaginative efforts of Herakleides Pont. and his story of Empedotimos’ vision (see above, chap. ix, [n. 111]). Herakl. contributed largely to popularizing the idea that the souls inhabit the air and giving it shape; the interest with which his fancies were studied is shown by the quotations from his book so common from Varro down to Proclus and Damascius. He must have been led to make the souls, on being freed from the body, float upwards (and occupy the stars or the moon—which are inhabitable heavenly bodies: Dox. 343, 7 ff.; 356a, 10) by the view—just as the Stoics after him were—that the soul is an αἰθέριον σῶμα (Philop.)—φωτοειδής, a lumen, Tert., An. 9. In this he is following an idea that had been common in the fifth century (held by Xenophanes, Epicharmos, Eurip.: see above, [p. 436] ff.), and had even attained popular vogue. This idea from the very first led to the conclusion that the soul, when ready for it, enters εἰς τὸν ὅμοιον αἰθέρα and ascends to the upper regions (of the aether). Herakleides carried this idea further and embellished it with philosophical and astronomical fancies. (On another occasion he seems to have denied substance and consistency to individual “souls”: Plu., Mor. v, p. 699 Wytt.—a view to which his doctrine of the ὄγκοι might easily have led him.) Poseidonios then took up this idea of Herakl. In this way, or at least not uninfluenced by this semi-philosophical literature, the belief in the abode of the “souls” in the aether attained the popularity that grave inscriptions witness for it (see below, ch. xiv, 2, [n. 135]).
[54] Cicero, following Poseid., imagines a blissful observation of the earth and the stars by the souls in the air: TD. i, 44–7 (cf. Sen., C. ad Marc. 25, 1–2); and similarly in Somn. Sci.; in both cases the idea certainly comes from Herakl. Pont.
[55] ἀπόσπασμα τοῦ θεοῦ [i, 36 Arn.].
[56] A frequently repeated Stoic dogma (stated with particular fullness by Senec., Ep. 93): see Gataker on M. Ant. (iii, 7), p. 108–9. The happiness of the (Stoic) wise man does not require μῆκος βίου τέλειου as Aristot. had maintained (see above, [n. 32]). In this point Stoic and Epicurean doctrine fully agreed: magni artificis est clusisse totum in exiguo: tantum sapienti sua, quantum deo omnis aetas patet (Sen., Ep. 53, 11, and see below, [n. 92]).
[57] Acc. to Panaitios there are duo genera in the soul which he calls inflammata anima (Cic., TD. i, 42). It is at any rate very probable that Panaitios (and Boëthos—roughly contemporary with Pan.: see Comparetti, Ind. Stoic., p. 78 f.—acc. to Macr., in S. Scip. 1, 14, 20) regarded the soul as compounded of two elements, aer et ignis, not [518] as a single and uncompounded πνεῦμα ἔνθερμον as the older Stoa had taught (see Schmekel, Philos. d. mittl. Stoa, 324 f.).
[58] φύσις and ψυχή: Pan. ap. Nemes., NH., p. 212 Matth. This clearly shows a tendency to a psychological dualism: Zeller, Stoics and Epicureans, p. 542 f. What further suggestions were made by Pan. about the division of the soul remains very problematical. The only more precise statement is Cicero’s, TD. i, 80 (speaking of Pan.), aegritudines iras libidinesque semotas a mente et disclusas putat.
[59] Panaitios denied not merely the immortality but even the διαμονή of the soul after death: Cic., TD. i, 78–9. Two reasons are there given: everything that has come into being (like the soul of man at birth) must also perish—the Aristotelian principle: see above, [n. 25]; what can feel pain (as the soul does) must become diseased and what is diseased must eventually perish. (Here the destruction of the soul from its own inward decay is asserted—not from the effect of external force at the world conflagration, the periodic occurrence of which Pan. at least called in question.) Acc. to Schmekel (mittl. Stoa, p. 309) it follows from Cic., TD. i, 42, that Panaitios also added a third argument: that the soul being composite must suffer the dissolution of its parts in death which change into other elements. This does not indeed at all follow from the passage, but such a view would almost have been inevitable with Panaitios’ doctrine of the soul and had already been suggested by Karneades in his polemic against the indestructibility of the divine and of every ζῷον—an argument to which Pan. on the whole yielded.
[60] Poseidonios distinguished in the human soul not three parts but three δυνάμεις μιᾶς οὐσίας ἐκ τῆς καρδίας ὁρμωμένης (Gal. v, 515), namely, the Platonic three, the λογιστικόν, θυμοειδές, ἐπιθυμητικόν (Gal. v, 476). The last two are the δυνάμεις ἄλογοι (they only give φαντασίαι the special forms taken by their impulses: Gal. v, 474, 399). The πάθη are not judgments nor the consequences of judgment but the motions (κινήσεις) of these δυνάμεις ἄλογοι (Gal. v, 429; cf. 378). In this way alone is it possible to understand how passion or wrong-doing can arise in man; it is because soul is not (as Chrysipp. had taught) pure reasoning power (cf. also Gal. iv, 820). There exists then in man an ἄλογον καὶ κακόδαιμον καὶ ἄθεον in addition to the δαίμων συγγενὴς τῷ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον διοικοῦντι: Gal. v, 469 f. How, indeed, this is possible when the soul is a single οὐσία and in its nature nothing but divine πνεῦμα it is difficult to say.—Pos. too was quite ignorant of an evil principle in the world, not the divine or contrary to the divine principle. The ethical teaching of Stoicism had always contained a dualism which is here transferred to the physical doctrine where it was originally unknown. From the time of Pos. there is an ever growing tendency to emphasize the contrast (which was, however, always familiar to the older Stoics as well) between “soul” and “body”, the inutilis caro ac fluida, Pos. ap. Sen., Ep. 92, 10. In view of this contrast the “soul” too is no longer said to come into being with the body or with the physical conception of the individual (cf. γεγονέναι τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ μεταγενεστέραν εἶναι [τοῦ σώματος], Chrysipp. ap. Plu., Sto. Rep. 1053 D [ii, 222 Arn.]), but rather to have been living before that, in the separate life of the divine. It is nowhere expressly or authoritatively stated that Poseidonios held the “pre-existence” of the “soul”; but that view has been rightly attributed to him, fitting in as it does with his other ideas, and because it is often introduced and taken for granted in those passages where [519] Cicero or Seneca are following Pos. (see Corssen, de Pos. Rhod., p. 25 ff. But we may not read the doctrine of pre-existence into S.E., M. ix, 71, as Heinze, Xenok. 134, 2, does). If the soul-δαίμων was in existence before its incarnation it can presumably only enter the body with the conception of the individual life θύραθεν, tractus extrinsecus as Cic. puts it, Div. ii, 119; a passage obviously related (as Bonhöffer, Epikt. 79 remarks) to the statement in Div. i, 64, where he is speaking of the immortales animi of which the air is full—and there Pos. is mentioned by name as the authority. From its pre-existent life in the air the “soul” enters into man. The multitude of individual bodiless souls—not only the one impersonal soul-substance of the world—were thus living before their ἐνσωμάτωσις, and the Stoic pantheism thus turns into a rather questionable “pandaemonism”. On the other hand, Poseidonios in opposition to his teacher, Panaitios, adheres to the doctrine of the periodic extinction of all life in the one Soul of the World, the original Fire: cf. Dox. 388a, 18; b, 19. Holding this view he cannot very well have put the origin of each of the individual soul-daimones before the beginning of the particular world-period in which they live. Nor can the survival of the souls after their separation from the body be prolonged beyond the next ἐκπύρωσις (which makes Cicero’s immortales animi inexact: Div. i, 64, after Pos.). Thus, although the survival which Panaitios had denied is reaffirmed it does not go beyond the qualified doctrine of immortality which the older Stoics had held. At the same time Pos. could hold, with Chrysipp. and other Stoics, that there was a περιοδικὴ παλιγγενεσία (M. Ant. xi, 1) after the world-conflagration and even that each individual man of the previous world-period would be restored again in precisely the same place (Chrysipp. ap. Lact., Inst. 7, 23, 3, etc.; ii, 189 Arn.; cf. the Orphico-Pythagorean fantasy: above, chap. x, [n. 47]). But this would not amount to an ἀθανασία for the individual: the individual life has been interrupted and is separated from its ἀποκατάστασις by a long interval of time.—There is no satisfactory reason for assigning to Pos. the belief in a series of μετενσωματώσεις of the soul—as Heinze does, Xen. 132 ff.—though such an idea would not have been hard to arrive at, even while holding fast to the doctrine of the final ἐκπύρωσις. But the dubious accounts given by many δοξογράφοι of Stoic teaching on the question of the μεταγγισμὸς ψυχῶν need not necessarily refer to Poseidonios: nor are we bound to draw this conclusion because they reappear in Plutarch. Plu. does indeed here and there follow Poseidonios, but he never hesitates to add Platonic ideas or fancies of his own invention, a fact which makes it most risky to attempt to fix an exact source for any particular detail in his variegated mosaic.