THE LATER AGE OF THE GREEK WORLD
PART I
PHILOSOPHY
Plato and the Platonic account of the nature, origin, and destiny of
the soul closes a period. It marks the end of that theological and
spiritualist movement to the force and significance of which nothing
bears clearer witness than the fact that it could have such a
conclusion. After this point its development ceases--at least it
disappears from the surface of Greek life: like one of those Asiatic
torrents with which the ancients were familiar it buries itself
underground for a long stretch of its course, only to reappear
eventually, with all the greater effect, far away from the place of
its origin. Even Plato's own school almost immediately after the
death of its master and directing spirit turned its attention in a
direction quite other than that which he had given it.[1\14] To have
retained the Platonic outlook would have made his pupils even more
isolated in their very different age than Plato himself had been in
his own.
Greece entered upon a new and final phase of her development. The
ominous breakdown of the older political fabric at the end of the
fourth century might have seemed likely to put an end to the natural
vitality of the Greek peoples. With the conquest of the East by
Macedonians and Greeks, however, new tasks were set before that
people and with the new task they acquired new faculties. The
_polis_, indeed, the purest expression of Greek constructive
ability, could not be restored to life. Such of the old and narrow
city-republics as had not perished completely in that stormy period
only languished in a stagnant peace. Rare, indeed, are the
exceptions in which (as particularly in Rhodos) a more vigorous and
independent life asserted itself. The new and swollen cities of the
Macedonian Empire, with their motley populations drawn from many
nationalities, could not make good the loss. The Leagues in which
Greece seemed to be making an effort to find a political
organization of a wider compass soon broke down under the effects of
inward {491} corruption and external violence. Even in its deepest
and most essential character the old national spirit of Greece,
which had drawn its strength from its clear-cut individuality,
seemed to be suffering damage through the unlimited extension
eastwards and westwards of Greek life. It did not cease to be an
immeasurable advantage to be a Greek, but a Greek now meant anyone
who had a share in the one thing that still distinguished and
characterized the Greeks, namely, Greek culture--and Greek culture
was no longer confined to a single nation. It was no fault of this
Greek humanism that not a single one of the vast populations of the
East (and in the West at last Rome stood alone) was able to make
their own this culture so generously offered to the whole world, so
that there, too, all should become _Greek_ who were capable of
becoming free human beings. Nevertheless, from all countries and
nationalities uncounted multitudes of _individuals_ entered into the
circle of this extended Hellenism. The way was open for all who
could live without the need of a way of life and thinking modelled
strictly upon national lines: for the culture which now united all
Greeks and Greek communities was based upon science--and science
knows nothing of national frontiers.
The science which could thus present itself as the guiding principle
of such a large and heterogeneous mass of cultured people, must at
any rate have reached a condition of stability if not of completely
rounded finality. After all the stir and controversy of the previous
centuries it had at last arrived at a period of contented enjoyment
of its own resources: the long drawn-out struggle, the restless
years of search were now held to have borne fruit. In philosophy at
least there was a distinct slackening of the insatiable zeal and
boldness of individual thinkers in posing new questions and wresting
answers or in seeking for fresh solutions to old problems. A few
great systems, formulated in accordance with the fixed tenets of the
various schools of thought, still offered a refuge to those who
demanded fixity and definition in their opinions; for centuries they
kept up their special traditions without serious alteration until
they, too, fell in pieces at last. A greater measure of independence
and variety was displayed by the special sciences which since they
had now been completely released for the first time from the
leading-strings of philosophy proceeded to develop freely in
accordance with their own principles. Art, too, was by no means
devoid as yet of originality and attractiveness, and in spite of the
overwhelming achievements of the past refused to be driven {492}
into a position of subservience and imitation. But it was no longer,
in conjunction with the peculiar customs and manners of a people,
the mistress and dispenser of wisdom and knowledge of the world. Art
becomes a plaything and an incidental diversion: it is science that
determines the general character and content of culture. But this
scientifically minded culture shares in the natural temper of all
science. Science has its feet firmly planted in life itself: it
keeps men's minds actively employed in this world; it has small
temptation to leave the firm ground of what is knowable and can
never be too well known, to voyage out into the region of the
intangible which can never be a subject of scientific inquiry. A
cool rationalism, a calm adherence to the intelligible and
thinkable, without any leanings to the gloomy terrors of a
mysterious world of the unknown--such is the temper that marks the
science and culture of the Hellenistic age and marks it more
distinctively than any other period of Greek culture. Such mysticism
as was still vigorous and effective kept itself timidly in the
background at this time; in the everyday world it is rather the
direct contrary of mysticism that we are made aware of; the unlovely
results of the prevailing rationalism, a bleak reasonableness, a
knowing and prosaic common sense such as stares dully at us from the
pages of Polybios' History as the point of view of the narrator
himself and of those of whom he writes. It was no age of heroes or
of the heroic. A weaker and more delicate generation holds the
field. The breakdown of political life and the disappearance of its
obligations made it more possible than it had ever been before for
the individual to lead his own life in his own way.[2\14] And he
makes the most of his freedom, his culture, the treasures of an
inward, private life enriched with all the brilliance and charm of
an old and perfected civilization. All the past had thought and
laboured on his behalf; he is not idle, but he is busy without ever
being in a hurry, enjoying his heritage and taking his ease in the
cooling sunlight of the long drawn-out autumn of Greek life. And he
is little concerned to inquire what may follow when this brilliant,
many-coloured world that surrounds him shall have vanished from his
gaze. This world is all in all to him. The hope or fear of
immortality has little effect upon the educated people of the
age.[3\14] Philosophy to which in one form or another they are all
more or less closely attached teaches them according to its
particular mood to cherish that hope or calmly to set it to one
side: in none of the popular sects {493} had the doctrine of the
eternity or imperishable nature of the soul any serious significance
as the central doctrine of a system. Natural science ruled the day,
while theology remained in the background and could only obtain a
doubtful hearing (if it was even listened to at all) for its
proclamation of the divine origin and everlasting life of the souls.
§ 2
At the outset of this period, and illuminating a long stretch of it
with the light of his genius, stands the figure of Aristotle. In
what this master _di color' che sanno_ had to say of the soul's
nature and destiny two voices are distinctly audible. The soul, he
instructs us, is that which in a living and organic physical body
brings the potentially existing to actual existence. It is the
_form_ to the body's matter, the culmination of the capacities of
independent life residing in the particular body. Bodiless and
immaterial itself, it is not the outcome of the mixture of the
various parts of the body; it is the cause, not the resultant, of
the vital functions of its body which exists for the soul's benefit
as its "instrument".[4\14] It dwells within a natural organism and
though it is itself unmoved it moves that organism as the source of
its growth and nourishment, of its desires and locomotion, of its
feeling and perceiving; while in the higher organisms it acts as the
combination of all these faces. It is as little to be thought of as
separate from the body--its own body--as the power of vision is in
separation from the eye or as its shape from the moulded waxen
image.[5\14] Theoretically, indeed, it is possible to distinguish
between body and soul, but actually and in the animated organism
they cannot be distinguished. When the living creature dies the
matter of which it was composed loses it special adaptation to a
purposeful organism, and this adaptation was its life; without it
there can be no independent "Substance" (~ousi/a~).[6\14] The Form,
the functional power of the once living organism, its "soul", has no
longer any independent existence.
This is the voice of Aristotle the physicist when he is speaking
from the standpoint of a physical doctrine which includes the study
of the soul "in so far as it occurs not without matter".[7\14]
Aristotle the metaphysician takes us further. In the soul of man,
besides the vital powers of the organized individual, there lives a
spiritual being of more than natural character and origin, the
"Mind"--"that in us which thinks and conceives".[8\14] This thinking
mind is not bound to the body and its life.[9\14] It does not come
into being with the creation of the human organism which is
completed by the addition of Mind. It has no beginning and was
uncreated from eternity:[10\14] it enters into man at his creation
"from without".[11\14] Even while it lives within the body it
remains unmingled with the body and its powers and uninfluenced by
them.[12\14] Enclosed within itself it lives its separate life as
something quite other than the "soul" (of which it is nevertheless
called a "part"[13\14]) and separated from it by a gulf. Comparable
with the God of Aristotle's world it transcends what might be called
its "little world",[14\14] the living human organism. It influences
that organism without being influenced in turn. It is akin to God;
it is called the "divine" in man.[15\14] Its activity is the same as
that of God.[16\14] God--pure substance, unlimited, highest,
everlasting actuality--is absolute and perpetually operant
thinking.[17\14] All practical activity, doing and creating, is far
removed from God.[18\14] So, too, the "Mind" is entirely occupied in
thinking (though here there is some alternation perhaps between the
potential and the actual).[19\14] It grasps, in an intuition of the
intellect that is beyond failure and error,[20\14] the "unmediated"
first principles, the first and highest concepts, immediately
certain and not deducible from still higher concepts, from which all
knowledge and philosophy is derived.[21\14]
In its association with the body and its "soul" this thinking Reason
lives as "the ruling"[22\14] element over both--not, however, as the
"realization" of this particular individual creature. The Mind is
indeed said to be that which the individual man "is",[23\14] and
without the addition of Mind the man could not exist, but the
special and personal character belonging to the individual is not to
be found in this reasoning Mind.[24\14] Mind is totally devoid of
distinguishable qualities and is identical in every case where it
appears; it is invariably foreign to the separate and individual
character of the man to whom it is added, and hardly seems to be
_his_ peculiar property.
When death occurs the thinking "Mind" is not involved in the
destruction which overtakes the human organism with which it was
associated. Death does not affect it. Like everything that is
without beginning it is indestructible.[25\14] It returns again to
its separate existence. Like the great World-Mind, God, and in
company with it--for it has not sprung from God and does not merge
again into God--the individual Mind of man continues in unending
life.[26\14] It {495} disappears now into impenetrable darkness. The
separate existence of the Mind is beyond not merely our perception
but our conceiving as well--persisting for itself alone, Mind has no
mental activity, no memory and no consciousness; indeed, it is
impossible to say what special qualities or activity can be
attributed to it beyond the simple predicate of existence, of
being.[27\14]
In the doctrine of this thinking Mind which is associated with the
human soul "from without" and never merges into it, of its
pre-existence from eternity, its kinship with God and its
imperishable life after its separation from the human organism--in
all this Aristotle preserves a mythological element taken from the
dogmatic teaching of Plato.
There was a time when he had been a complete Platonist precisely in
his doctrine of the soul. In his youth, like other members of the
Academy, he had yielded[28\14] to the fascination of clothing in
artistic and perfected language brilliant fantasies about the
origin, nature, and destiny of the soul--the divine daimon[29\14]
inhabiting the mortal frame of man. Later, however, it seemed
inconceivable to him that "any soul may inhabit any body".[30\14] He
could only conceive of the "soul" of the individual man as a
realization of the life of this entirely distinct and physical
organism, to which it is indissolubly bound as the purpose and form
of the particular instrument. All the vital powers as well as
appetite, perception, memory, and reflective thought, appeared to
him merely as the modes of activity manifested by the animated body
which is itself unthinkable apart from its "soul". And yet he still
preserved a relic of the old dualistic opposition between the body
and the independent substantial soul--the same conception of the
soul, in fact, as that which Plato had himself, in the later period
of his philosophical development, alone retained. This was as the
contemplative Mind which is occupied in apprehending the highest
truths in intellectual intuition; and this mind is, according to
Aristotle, not to be included in the "soul", but to be separated
from it as a special being that has descended from the heights of
divinity and has been coupled with the soul from without and for its
limited period of life. The origin of this conception of a
reduplicated soul is plain: it is derived from memories of Plato and
beyond that from theological doctrine which was itself in the last
resort but a spiritualized restatement of primeval popular fancies
of the psyche that dwells in the living body. But though he took
over the doctrine he did not take over the special sense that {496}
the theologians had given to it: he omitted both the conclusions
they drew and the exhortations they based upon it. We hear no more
of the "purification" of the divine Mind within mankind. It has
nothing impure or evil in it nor can any breath of pollution affect
it from without. The effort towards the "other world" of purity, the
denial and rejection of its earthly partner the living body, are
foreign to the "Mind" of Aristotle.[31\14] It has no impulse to
"deliverance" or self-emancipation; it knows of no peculiar task
that points beyond this world. The presence of this "separable" Mind
in the living man is an assured fact, and nothing more: no purpose
in life is deducible from it. The fact itself seemed to be evident
from the power that man possesses of grasping immediately a highest
form of knowledge that is beyond demonstration, not as the result of
the mental activity of his soul, for the apprehension is prior to
the soul, but by means of a higher spiritual faculty, a special
intellectual being that seemed to proclaim its presence and
existence within man in this way. It is thus by way of a theory of
knowledge not of a theological doctrine that we arrive at the
distinction between "Mind" and "Soul". But the doctrine thus
reasserted was in reality nothing but the old doctrine of the
theologians. This "Mind", too, seems to the thinker to be a being
akin to God. The pure contemplative existence, a life consisting in
the contemplation of the final objects of intuition is counted as a
privilege of the divine and of all divine beings, as the true
purpose of vital energy and of its manifestation; and in the
description of this state the sober reserve of his lecture style
seems to be uplifted and almost illuminated with the warmth and
brilliance imparted by a genuine glow of personal experience.[32\14]
This pure activity of contemplation, finding its deepest
satisfaction in itself, belongs to the divine in man--to the Mind;
its whole life lies in this. This activity, however, the Mind
performs and finishes in this life, while it is united with the body
and the body's "soul". There is nothing left that can be thought of
as forming the content of the life and activity of the Mind in its
separate existence after the completion of its period of life on
earth. Mind and the man with whom it is associated can hardly have a
very urgent desire for that emancipation in "another world" which is
thus left blank and without content for our thought. The thought of
immortality cast in this form could no longer possess any real value
or ethical significance for man.[33\14] It arises from a logical
deduction, from metaphysical considerations, not {497} from a demand
of the spirit. It lacks not only the distinctness that might have
appealed to the senses and given direction to the imagination, but
the power (or the intention) of playing a leading part in the
conduct or direction of life on this earth. There is no inspiration
in this doctrine--not even for the philosopher, though it was to him
and his activity and his efforts that the picture and panegyric of
"Mind", the philosopher in man, had really referred.
It was quite possible to abide by the teaching and philosophy of
Aristotle, directed as it was to the observation and interpretation
of the things of this world, while abandoning the advanced post of
the doctrine of Mind--that Being which has sunk to the level of this
world from the other world of divinity, which separates itself, with
the death of man, once more to everlasting divine life though hardly
to a continuation of individual existence. On this point in
particular free discussion of the master's teaching maintained
itself in his school: some, and by no means the weakest, of
Aristotle's successors denied altogether and in every form the
doctrine of immortality.[34\14]
§ 3
The dogmatic teaching of the Stoics on the subject of the human soul
is closely bound up with the materialistic pantheism by means of
which they explained all the phenomena of life, of being and
becoming upon earth. God is All, and divinity is nothing outside
this "all", which forms the world: the Universe is God. God is thus
not only the matter but the form, the life and the power of the
world. Divinity is the original matter, the etherial Fire, the fiery
"breath" which maintains itself or changes and in innumerable
metamorphoses creates the world. God is also what supplies a purpose
to this world and is the purposeful force--the reason and law of the
world. The universal deity which is thus at once matter, mind, and
formative principle sends out from itself at varying periods the
multiplicity of Appearance and then again at another time takes back
the multifarious and the divided into the fiery unity of its own
breath of life. Thus, in everything that has shape, in everything
that lives and moves, the content and the unifying form is God: he
is and works as their "state" in inorganic things, as "nature" in
plants, as "irrational soul" in the other living things, as rational
and thinking soul in man.[35\14] {498}
The soul of man, thus endowed with reason, is a fragment of the
divine,[36\14] and is itself divine like everything else in the
world but in a purer sense than all other things. It has remained
closer to the first and original essence of the divine, conceived as
"creative fire" (~pu=r technikô/n~), than the earthly fire which has
lost much of its original purity and refinement. It is closer[37\14]
than the lower matter that in all its changeful forms degenerates
progressively as it gets farther and farther away from the divine
fire by gradual loss of the tension (~to/nos~) that had once been
living and active in the primeval fire; closer even than the
material of its own body in which it dwells and rules. As something
essentially distinct from the body, then, the individual soul comes
into being among the elements of its body when that body is
conceived, and it develops its full nature after the birth of the
individual.[38\14] But even in its individual, separate existence it
remains incompletely detached from the universal life that is
present in it; it remains subject to the "universal Law" of the
world, which is God, and fast bound by "fate", the "destiny"
(~peprôme/nê, heimarme/ne~) which decrees the course of their
existence for the totality of all Life and the individual
lives.[39\14] Nevertheless, the soul has its special gifts and
special task--it is capable of self-determination and is responsible
for its own decisions and acts. Though it is a pure emanation from
the universal Reason and bound down to no irrational elements, it
has the power of irrational choice and can resolve upon what is
evil. Though they have all sprung from one and the same original
source the individual souls are of very different character,
intellect, and propensity of will. Unreason in thought, will, and
conduct is common in the world; those who have real insight are few;
in fact, the Wise Man, the man who keeps his own will in complete
harmony with the universal and divine direction of the world, is but
a picture of imaginary perfection, _naturæ humanæ exemplar_, never
fully and perfectly realized in actual life.
Ethical interests demanded the freedom and independence of the moral
personality and its will, which can only fulfil the requirements of
duty by self-mastery and the overthrow of base impulses; but this
independence was in conflict with the essential principles of Stoic
metaphysics. The Stoics taught that the world (and the soul included
in it) is only the necessary self-development of a single and
absolute Being that excludes all independent and separate
multiplicity. Nor could they recognize any principle of Evil, an
anti-rational principle answering to the purity of divine power,
working {499} evil and suggesting it, and making the individual
capable of wilful disobedience to the laws of all-embracing
divinity. Pure pantheism, uniting God and the world in indissoluble
unity, cannot imagine a real conflict between humanity and divinity;
it cannot postulate a principle of Evil through the overthrow of
which a lost unity with God is to be restored. Pantheism makes no
claims of an ethical or religious kind. The ingenuity of the Stoic
doctors was exercised in vain in the attempt to find a way out of
this dilemma.[40\14]
From the very origin of the school two tendencies were discernible
in the teaching of the Stoa, derived as that teaching was from such
different sources. On the one hand, the ethical doctrine of the
Cynics, to whom the Stoics owed the greater part of their practical
teaching, threw the individual back upon his own resources and made
everything depend upon the determination of his own will. It thus
pointed in the direction of the most self-sufficient
individualism--to an ethical atomism. The physical doctrine derived
from Herakleitos, on the other hand, merged the individual
completely into the omnipotence and omnipresence of the All-One; and
therefore, as its ethical counterpart, demanded that this relation
of the individual to the universal Logos of the world should find
expression in a life lived completely _ex ductu rationis_, in
unconditional abandonment of the individual will to the Universal
Mind that is the World and God.[41\14] In actual fact it was
Cynicism that had the profounder influence in ethical matters. The
universal Law and order of the world, embracing both universe and
individual in its absolute decrees, threw its net too widely to be
able to answer closely enough to the needs of narrow and individual
existence. No practical ethics could possibly unite this distant and
final aim with the individual man in a single nexus of ordered
self-determination. The intermediate link between the universe and
its laws, on the one hand, and the individual with his private will,
on the other, had formerly been the Greek _polis_ with its law and
custom. But it was a cosmopolitan age, and for the Stoics as well as
for the Cynics before them the city-state had lost most of its
educative force. The individual saw himself more and more left to
his own devices and forced to depend upon his own strength--his life
had to be ordered on self-erected standards and guided by self-found
rules. Individualism, which gave its tone to the age more decisively
than in any past period of Greek life, began to win a footing even
in this pantheistic system. The "Wise Man" who is a law to himself
in perfect {500} self-determination,[42\14] and feels himself bound
only to those like himself,[43\14] is individualism's fairest
flower.
But the soul, thus elevated to a height where it was capable of much
that was impossible for or only incompletely within the reach of its
weaker sisters, began more and more to seem like something rather
different from a mere dependent offshoot of the One divine power
that is the same everywhere. It is, in fact, regarded as an
independent, divine, and self-enclosed creature in those passages
where in Stoic literature, as in the older literature of the
theologians, the soul is called a "daimon"--the daimon dwelling
within the individual man, and given to him as his associate.[44\14]
Death, too, is regarded by this professedly monist system as a
separation of soul from body[45\14] in accordance with what was
really a naive or a conscious spiritualism. In death, then, this
soul-essence whose independence had been so marked even in life,
does not perish with the body--it does not even lose itself again in
the One from which it had taken its origin. An infinitely extended
individual life is indeed not attributed to the individual souls:
only God, the one Soul of the World, is eternally
indestructible.[46\14] But the souls which have arisen by separation
from the one and all-embracing divinity, survive the destruction of
their bodies: until the final dissolution, in the Conflagration that
will make an end of the present period of world-history, they
persist in their independent life; either all of them (as was the
older teaching of the school) or, as Chrysippos, the master of Stoic
orthodoxy, taught the souls of the "Wise" only, while the others
have been lost in the general life of the Whole some time
previously.[47\14] The stronger ethical personality is held together
in itself for a longer time.[48\14]
From the point of view of physical science and materialist
doctrine[49\14] it was also hard to see why the soul, composed of
pure fire-breath, which even in life had held the body together and
had not been held together by the body,[50\14] should disappear at
once when that body was disintegrated. As it had once held the body
together, so it might well and all the more easily hold itself
together now. Its lightness carries it upwards into the pure air
under the moon, where it is fed by the breath that rises upwards and
where there is nothing that can put an end to it.[51\14] An
"underworld" region like that of popular imagination and theological
teaching, was expressly denied by the Stoics.[52\14] Their
imagination preferred to exercise itself in an imaginary extension
of life in the Aether, which was their region of {501} the
souls;[53\14] but as a rule it appears that such flights of fancy
were avoided. The life of the souls after death--that of the wise as
well as of the unwise--remained indistinct and without
content[54\14] in the imagination of those whose life was still upon
earth.
Thus, the doctrine of the soul-personality and its continued
existence (never simply expanded into personal immortality), which
was in reality not required by the metaphysical principles of
Stoicism, and could indeed hardly be reconciled with them, had in
fact no serious significance for the general intention and substance
of Stoicism--least of all for Stoic ethics and conduct of life. The
philosophy of Stoicism is directed to the study of life, not of
death. In this life on earth and only here can the purpose of human
endeavour--the reproduction of divine wisdom and virtue in the human
spirit--be fulfilled in manful contest with contrary impulses,
fulfilled, that is, in so far as such a thing is possible for lonely
and isolated fragments of divinity.[55\14]
But virtue is sufficient in itself for the attainment of
happiness--a happiness which loses nothing through the brevity of
its duration and to which nothing would be added by the prolongation
of its span.[56\14] Nothing in the doctrine of Stoicism points man,
or the Wise Man, to another world beyond the life of the body and
outside this earthly theatre of conflict and duty, for the
fulfilment of his being and his task.
§ 4
The limited doctrine of immortality which, as we have seen, was not
an essential part of the teaching of Stoicism, began to be called in
question as soon as the rigid dogmatism of the school was subjected
to the too-searching criticism of other schools of thought. In the
clash of opinions Stoicism began to be doubtful of the absolute
validity of its own teaching. The boundaries of orthodox doctrine
once so firmly drawn now became more fluid; exchange and even
compromise became common. Panaitios, the first writer among the
pedantic professors of Stoicism to achieve a wider popularity for
his writings, became the teacher and friend of those aristocratic
Romans who found in Greek philosophy the impulse to a humanism that
the barren soil of Rome could never have produced unaided. And
Panaitios differed in more than one point from the strict orthodoxy
of the older Stoicism. For him the soul is formed of two distinct
elements[57\14]--it is no longer simple and undivided, but {502}
compounded of "Nature" and "Soul" (in the narrower sense).[58\14] In
death these two elements separate and change into other forms. The
soul having had its origin at a particular point in past time now
perishes in time. Being capable of grief and subject to the
destructive influence of the emotions it falls a victim at last to
its own pains. Panaitios, while remaining a Stoic, taught the
dissolution of the soul, its death and simultaneous destruction with
the death of the body.[59\14]
His pupil Poseidonios, who as a writer possessed an even greater
influence than Panaitios with the great majority of cultivated
readers who belonged to no special school of thought, returned to
the older Stoic doctrine of the simple and undivided nature of the
soul as fiery breath. He distinguished three faculties but not three
separate and independent elements in the human soul, and as a
consequence of this view had no further need to believe in the
dissolution of the soul into its component parts at death. He also
denied the origin of the individual soul in time, from which the
doctrine of its destruction in time had seemed to follow by a
logical necessity. He returned to the old theological idea of the
pre-existence of the soul, its life since the beginning of the
created world; and could therefore go on to assert its continued
existence after death--at least till the time of the next
destruction of the World at the hands of omnipotent Fire.[60\14]
It was not an inward and private necessity that led to this
transformation of the old teaching of the School. Doubts and
criticisms levelled at it from outside--from the Sceptics in
particular--had necessitated the change. While some gave up the
struggle, others sought refuge in a re-arrangement of the figures of
the dialectical game and by the introduction of fresh
characters.[61\14] Immortality might be abandoned to criticism or
reaffirmed in either case with equal indifference. The Platonic and
poetic version of Stoicism provided by Poseidonios may have found a
wider response among the readers of a highly cultivated society who
felt the need of a doctrine of immortality more as a satisfaction to
the artistic fancy than from any deeper or more temperamental
causes. Cicero, the most eloquent representative of the Hellenized
Roman culture of the time, may perhaps give us a picture of the
refined and æsthetic partiality with which these ideas were taken
up. In the _Dream of Scipio_ and the first book of the _Tusculans_,
he gives an account, mainly based on Poseidonios, of the belief then
held of a continued life of the soul in the divine element of the
Aether.[62\14] {503}
§ 5
Stoicism had a long and vigorous life. More than ever during the
first and second centuries of our era did it fulfil its real task of
acting as a practical guide to conduct, not as a mere museum of dead
erudition. It made good its claim to provide its adherents with the
autonomous freedom and independence of a mind at peace with itself,
whose virtue was proof against the tribulation and failure of life,
and not corrupted by its plenty. It was not always blind imitation
of a literary fashion or the love of displaying virtuous paradoxes
that attracted the noblest of the higher Roman aristocracy to the
doctrines of Stoicism. Not a few of them guided their lives in
accordance with its principles and even died for their convictions.
Not entirely "without tragic emotion", as the Stoic Emperor would
prefer it, but at any rate with conscious and deliberate
purpose--not in mere unreasoning **stubbornness[63\14]--did these
Stoic martyrs go to their death. Nor was it the unquestioned
certainty of a continued life in a higher existence that made them
so ready to give up life upon this earth.[64\14] Each in the special
manner dictated to him by his own temperament and the circumstances
of his life, they still speak to us, these leaders of Roman
Stoicism--Seneca the philosophic director of the world's conscience,
Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, and those instructors and patterns of
the aspiring youth of Rome, Musonius and Epictetus. The eager and
unswerving effort of these wise men to educate themselves to the
attainment of freedom and peace, of purity and goodness of heart,
wins our admiration--not least in the case of Seneca in whom the
struggle for self-mastery and philosophic calm must have been a
continual war with his own too-receptive and imaginative nature. But
just as they looked for no supernatural helper and redeemer but
trusted to the power of their own spirit for the assurance of
success, so they required no promise of a future crowning of their
labours in an after-life of the soul. The whole scope of their
endeavour lies within the limits of this world. The old Stoic belief
in the continued life of the individual soul until the annihilation
of all separate creation in the World Conflagration[65\14] is
regarded at the best as one possibility among many[66\14]--it is
perhaps but a "beautiful dream".[67\14] But whether death is a
transition to another form of being or a complete termination of
individual life--to the wise man it is equally welcome, for he
measures the value of life not by the number {504} of its years but
by the richness of its content. At bottom Seneca is inclined to the
view that death is the end of all things for man, after which
"everlasting peace" awaits the restless spirit.[68\14]
The Stoic Emperor is uncertain whether death is a dissipation of the
elements of the soul (as the atomists teach) or whether the mind
survives in a conscious or an unconscious existence that must yet
disappear eventually in the life of the Whole. All things are in
perpetual flux--so the Law of the universe has willed it--nor shall
the human personality maintain itself untouched and unchanged. But
even supposing that death is a "putting out" of his small individual
candle, the wise man is not afraid: to the melancholy that is the
prevailing mood of his gentle, pure, and high-strung character
Death, the annihilator, seems to beckon like a friend.[69\14]
The tougher spirit of the Phrygian slave and freedman needed no
conviction of personal survival to enable him to face the battle of
earthly life with courage and intrepidity. What has been made must
be unmade: without hesitation and without regret the wise man gives
himself up to the laws of the rationally-ordered universe in which
the present must make way for the future--not indeed to be lost
entirely, but to be changed and to merge its individuality, its
unimportant self in new manifestations of the creative stuff of
Life. The Whole does not perish, but its parts change and alter
their relations among themselves.[70\14] The pantheistic principles
of the school which had been taken over from Herakleitos and which
made it permanently inconceivable that the diminutive individual
spark of life could achieve a lasting separation from the central
fiery mass, had become a settled conviction. The passionate
abandonment of the personal, short-lived self to the everlasting
Whole and One had become a fixed habit of mind. No longer did it
seem intolerable that the individual existence should pass away
after a brief span of life; it was possible to remain a Stoic and
yet assert expressly, like Cornutus the teacher of Persius, that
with the death of its body there is an end, too, of the individual
soul.[71\14]
§ 6
The atomist doctrine renewed by Epicurus demanded in the most
emphatic manner of its adherents that they should abandon the belief
in personal survival.
For the atomist the soul is corporeal, a compound made {505} up of
the most mobile of the atoms which form the plastic elements of air
and fire. It occupies all parts of the body, and is held together by
the body, while at the same time, and in spite of this, holding
itself in essential distinctness from the body.[72\14] Epicurus also
speaks of the "Soul" as a special and enduring substance within the
body, a "part" of the corporeal, not a mere "harmony" resulting from
the association of the parts of the body.[73\14] He even speaks of
two parts or modes of manifestation in the "soul"; the irrational,
which holds the whole body in its sway as its vital force, and the
rational, situated in the breast, which exercises will and
intelligence and is the last and most essential source of life in
living things, without the undivided presence of which death
occurs.[74\14] _Anima_ and _animus_ (as Lucretius calls them),
distinct but not separable from one another,[75\14] come into being
in the embryo of man and grow to maturity, old age and decay,
together with the body.[76\14] If death occurs it means that the
atoms belonging to the body are separated and the soul-atoms
withdrawn--even before the final dissolution of the body, the
separable "soul" disappears. No longer held together by the body, it
is blown away in the wind, it disappears "like smoke" in the
air.[77\14] The soul, this soul that had animated the individual
man, is no more.[78\14] The material elements of which it was
composed are indestructible; it is quite possible that they may at
some future time combine together with the life-stuff to produce new
life and consciousness of exactly the same kind as had once been
joined together in the living man. But, if so, it will be a new
creature that thus comes into being: the original man has been
annihilated by death; there is no bond of continuous consciousness
uniting him with the fresh creation.[79\14] The vital forces of the
world are continuous, undiminished, indestructible, but in the
formation of the individual living creature they are only lent
temporarily, for this occasion and for a brief period, after which
they are withdrawn for ever from the particular creature. _Vitaque
mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu._
After his death the individual is unaffected by the fate of his
inanimate body;[80\14] nor should he be troubled by the thought of
what may happen to the atoms of his soul. Death does not concern him
at all; for he only is when death is not; where death is, he is no
longer there.[81\14] Sensation and consciousness have left him at
the dissolution of body and soul; what he cannot possibly feel
affects him no longer. Epicurean maxims are never tired of driving
home {506} this proposition: death is nothing to us.[82\14] From
every possible direction, from abstract principle and practical
experience in actual life, Lucretius labours to demonstrate the
truth of this view[83\14] as ardently as other philosophers seek to
prove its opposite. Physical science has no more valuable service to
render than that of convincing us of its truth.[84\14] Just as the
wisdom of Epicurus has no other purpose than to protect man, of all
creatures the one most sensitive to pain, from distress and
anguish--and even pleasure is but the removal of pain--so more
particularly, in putting an end to the fear of death and the craving
after unceasing life, it serves this finite life itself,[85\14] that
is committed to us once and for all and never repeated.[86\14] If a
man has once succeeded in realizing that he will cease to be in the
moment of death's coming, he will neither be oppressed with terror
at the threatened loss of self-consciousness nor will the terrors of
eternity[87\14] or the fabulous monsters of the spirit-world below
the earth[88\14] darken his existence by casting their dark shadow
over all his life.[89\14] He will devote himself to life without
repining, neither fearing death nor seeking it.[90\14]
He alone--the ideal Wise Man of the Epicurean faith--will know how
to live as the true artist of his own life;[91\14] he will not waste
the precious time in vain preparations for the future,[92\14] but
will cram every moment to the full so that his brief span of
existence will have all that a long life could give. Long life, in
fact, even life without an end, would not make him any happier or
any richer. What life has to offer it has already offered--anything
further must only be a repetition of what has gone before: _eadem
sunt omnia semper._[93\14] The Wise Man has no reason even to look
for an eternity of life.[94\14] In his own personality, in this
present "now", he possesses all the conditions necessary to
happiness. The very transience of this supreme happiness to which
mortality can attain makes it seem the more valuable to him. To the
development and the enjoyment of this, the only life that belongs to
him he will devote himself exclusively. In ethical matters, too, the
atomist doctrine holds good. There is no such thing in nature as an
essential community of human beings--still less of humanity--there
are only individuals.[95\14] In associations entered into by free
and unforced choice the individual may attach himself to the
individual as one friend to another; but the political societies
that men have invented and set up among themselves have no
obligations for the Wise Man. He is himself the centre and indeed
the whole circumference of the world surrounding {507} him. State
and society are valuable, and indeed only exist for the protection
of the individual and to make it possible for him under their
enfolding care to develop his own personality in freedom.[96\14] The
individual, on the other hand, does not exist for the state, but for
himself. "It is no longer necessary to save the Hellenes or to win
crowns of victory from them in contests of wisdom."[97\14] Such is
the decision reached with a sigh of relief by a civilization that
has attained the highest point of its development and is now
overcome by a lassitude in which it no longer sets itself new tasks,
but takes its ease as age may be permitted to do. In its lassitude
it no longer hopes, and in all honesty no longer cares, to extend
the period of its existence beyond the limits of this earthly life.
Calm and untroubled it sees this life, dear though it may once have
been, fade away, taking its leave and sinking into nothingness
without a struggle.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV
PART I
[1\14: At first the philosophy of Plato's old age lived on in spirit
in the Academy. Just as his pupils carried on his Pythagorean
speculations about numbers, reduced his imaginative suggestions as
to a daimonic nature intermediate between that of God and man to
pedantic system, and elaborated the theological strain in his
thought to a gloomy and burdensome _deisidaimonia_ (witness esp. the
_Epinomis_ of Philippos of Opos and in addition all that we know of
Xenokrates' speculations)--so too they retained and respected for a
time the Platonic doctrine of the soul and the ascetic tendency in
his ethical teaching. For Philippos of Opos the aim of all human
endeavour is a final and blessed emancipation from this world
(which, however, is only possible for a few of those who are, in his
special manner, "wise"--973 C ff., 992 C). He is a mystic for whom
this earth and its life fall away into nothing: all serious interest
is confined to the contemplation of divine things such as are
revealed in mathematics and astronomy. Again, the Platonic doctrine
of the soul, in its mystic and world-renouncing sense, lies at the
bottom of the fabulous narratives of Herakleides Pontikos (in the
~A/baris, Empedo/timos~, etc.). This, too, accounts for the youthful
attempts in this direction of Aristotle himself (in the ~Eu/dêmos~
and probably also in the ~Protreptiko/s~). This side of his doctrine
was as it seems systematized from the standpoint of the latest stage
of Platonism by Xenokrates in particular. It may be merely accident
that we do not hear very reliably of anything indicating an ascetic
tendency or an "other-worldly" effort after **emancipation of the
soul in connexion with Xenokrates. Krantor (in his much-read book
~peri\ pe/nthous~) was already capable of employing the Platonic
doctrine of the soul and the imaginative fancies that could be
attached to it simply as a literary adornment. And before him his
teacher Polemon betrays a turning aside from the true Platonic
mysticism. With Arkesilaos the last vestige of this whole type of
thought disappears completely.]
[2\14: ~toi=s _eleuthe/rois hê/kista_ e/xestin ho/ ti e/tuche
poiei=n, alla pa/nta ê\ ta\ plei=sta te/taktai~, Arist., _Meta._
1075a, 19 (in maxima fortuna minima licentia est, Sall., _C._ 51,
13). Freedom in _this_ sense indeed was a thing of the past.]
[3\14: Not that such hopes or fears were entirely absent. The reader
will remember the case of Kleombrotos of Ambrakia (Call., _Ep._ 25),
who by reading the _Phaedo_ of Plato (and completely
misunderstanding the meaning of the prophet, as not unfrequently
happens) was led to seek an immediate entrance into the life of the
other world by a violent break with this one--and committed suicide.
This is an isolated example of a mood to which Epiktetos bears
witness as common in his own much later time--the desire felt by
many young men of ardent temperament to escape from the distracted
life of humanity and return as quickly as possible to the universal
life of God by the destruction of their own individual existence:
Epict. 1, 9, 11 ff. But in the earlier period such violent
manifestations of other-worldly fanaticism were of rare occurrence.
Hedonism was {509} capable of leading to the same result as we may
see from the ~Apokarterô=n~ of Hegesias the Cyrenaic, called ~ho
peisitha/natos~, whom Cicero mentions together with this same
Kleombrotos: _TD._ i, 83-4.]
[4\14: ~to\ sô=ma/ pôs tê=s psuchê=s he/neken (ge/gonei)~, as ~ho
pri/ôn tê=s pri/seôs he/neka~--and not vice versa: _PA._ 1, 5, 645b,
19.]
[5\14: The ~psuchê/~ is related to the body as ~o/psis~ is to the
eye, i.e. as the effective power residing in the ~o/rganon~ (not
like ~ho/rasis~, the individual act of vision). It is the ~_prô/tê_
entele/cheia~ of its body _de An._ ii, 1, 412a, 27. There is no
~su/nthesis~ of ~sô=ma~ and ~psuchê/~: they are simply "together"
like the wax and the ball formed out of the wax: _Top._ 151a, 20
ff.; _GA._ 729b, 9 ff.; _de An._ 412b, 7.]
[6\14: ~apelthou/sês gou=n (tê=s psuchê=s) ou/keti zô=|o/n estin,
oude\ tô=n mori/ôn oude\n to\ auto\ lei/petai, plê\n tô=| schê/mati
mo/non katha/per ta\ mutheuo/mena lithou=sthai~, _PA._ 641a, 18.]
[7\14: _Meta._ 1026a, 5: ~peri\ psuchê=s eni/as theôrê=sai tou=
phusikou=, ho/sê mê\ a/neu tê=s hulê=s esti/n.--oude\ ga\r pa=sa
psuchê\ phu/sis, alla/ ti mo/rion autê=s~, _PA._ 641b, 9. The
subject of ~to\ kechôrisme/non~ of the soul is studied by ~ho
prô=tos philo/sophos~: _de An._ 403b, 16.]
[8\14: ~le/gô de\ nou=n, hô=| dianoei=tai kai\ hupolamba/nei hê
psuchê/~, _de An._ 429a, 23.]
[9\14: The ~nou=s~ and its ~theôrêtikê\ du/namis e/oike psuchê=s
ge/nos he/teron ei=nai kai\ tou=to mo/non ende/chetai chôri/zesthai,
katha/per to\ aï/dion tou= phthartou=, ta\ de\ loipa\ mo/ria tê=s
psuchê=s ouk e/sti chôrista/ ktl.~, _de An._ 413b, 25.]
[10\14: There can be no doubt that Aristotle's opinion was that
~nou=s~ was uncreated and existed without beginning from eternity:
see Zeller, _Sitzb. Berl. Ak._ 1882, p. 1033 ff.]
[11\14: ~thu/rathen epeise/rchetai~ into the man as he is being
made, _GA._ 736b, 28; cf. ~ho thu/rathen nou=s~, 744b, 21.]
[12\14: ~nou=s~ is ~apathê/s, amigê/s, ou me/miktai tô=|
sô/mati~--it has no physical ~o/rganon~, _de An._ iii, 4. ~oude\n
autou= (tou= nou=) tê=| energei/a| koinônei= sômatikê\ ene/rgeia~,
_GA._ 736b, 28.]
[13\14: ~mo/rion tê=s psychê=s~, _de An._ 429a, 10 ff. ~psuchê\ ouch
ho/lê, all' hê noêtikê/~, 429a, 28. ~hê psuchê\ . . . mê\ pa=sa all'
ho nou=s~, _Meta._ 1070a, 26.]
[14\14: The ~zô=|on~ a ~mikro\s ko/smos~, _Phys._ 252b, 26.]
[15\14: ~nou=s, theio/tero/n ti kai\ apathe/s~, _de An._ 408b,
29.--~to\n nou=n thei=on ei=nai mo/non~, _GA._ 736b, 28 (737a, 10).
~ei/te thei=on ho/n ei/te tô=n en hêmi=n to\ thei/otaton~, _EN._
1177a, 15. ~nou=s~ is ~to\ suggene/staton~ to the gods, 1179a,
26.--~to\ anthrô/pôn ge/nos ê\ mo/non mete/chei tou= thei/ou tô=n
hêmi=n gnôri/môn zô/|ôn ê\ ma/lista pa/ntôn~, _PA._ 656a, 7.]
[16\14: ~e/rgon tou= theiota/tou to\ noei=n kai\ phronei=n~, _PA._
686a, 28.]
[17\14: _Meta._ ~L~ 7, 9.]
[18\14: _EN._ 1178b, 7-22; _Cael._ 292b, 4 ff.]
[19\14: So too ~epikalu/ptetai ho nou=s eni/ote pa/thei ê\ no/sô| ê\
hu/pnô|~, _de An._ 429a, 7.]
[20\14: ~thigga/nein~ is the term often applied to the activity of
~nou=s~, i.e. a simple and indivisible act of apperceiving the
~asu/ntheta~. This act not being composite (of subject and
predicate), like judgment, leaves no room for error: the act simply
occurs or does not occur--~alêthe/s~ or ~pseu=dos~ does not enter
into the question with it. _Meta._ 1051b, 16-26 (~thigei=n~, 24-5),
1027b, 21.]
[21\15: ~ta\ alêthê= kai\ prô=ta kai\ _a/mesa_ kai\ gnôrimô/tera
kai\ pro/tera kai\ ai/tia tou= sumpera/smatos~, _An. Po._ i, 2, This
~ame/sôn epistê/mê anapo/deiktos~ (72b, 19) belong to ~nou=s~. There
is only a ~nou=s~--not an ~epistê/mê~ (as being a ~he/xis
apodeiktikê/~, _EN._ 1139b, 31)--~tô=n _archô=n_, tê=s archê=s tou=
epistêtou=~, _EN._ vi, 6. Thus also ~nou=s~ is ~epistê/mês archê/~,
_An. Po._ 100b, 5-17. ~tô=n akinê/tôn ho/rôn kai\ prô/tôn nou=s
esti\ kai\ ou lo/gos~, _EN._ 1143b, 1 (cf. _MM._ 1197a, 20 ff.).]
{510}
[22\14: ~to\ ku/rion~, _EN._ 1178a, 3, and frequently. ~nou=s dokei=
archei=n kai\ hêgei=sthai~, 1177a, 14. It rules esp. over ~o/rexis~
(as ~hê psuchê/~ does over the ~sô=ma~), _Pol._ 1254b, 5 (cf. _EN._
1102b, 29 ff.).]
[23\14: A man is called ~egkratê/s~ or ~akratê/s, tô=| katei=n to\n
nou=n ê\ mê/; hôs tou/tou heka/stou o/ntos~, _EN._ 1168b, 35.
~do/xeie d' a/n kai\ ei=nai he/kastos tou=to (nou=s)~, 1178a, 2.
~tô=| anthrô/pô| dê\ (kra/tiston kai\ ê/diston) ho kata\ to\n nou=n
bi/os, ei/per tou=to ma/lista a/nthrôpos~ (here only in so far as
the possession of ~nou=s~ distinguishes men in general from the
other ~zô=|a~), 1178a, 6.]
[24\14: Cicero makes a distinction of this kind between _ratio_ and
_animus_. _Off._ i, 107 (after Panaetius): intellegendum est, duabus
quasi nos a natura indutos esse personis; quarum una communis est ex
eo quod omnes participes sumus rationis . . . ; altera autem quae
proprie singulis est tributa.]
[25\14: ~ha/panta ta\ gino/mena kai\ phtheiro/mena phai/netai~,
_Cael._ 279b, 20. ~to\ geno/menon ana/gkê te/los labei=n~, _Ph._
203b, 8. But ~ha/pan to\ aei\ o/n haplôs a/phtharton. homoi/ôs de\
kai\ age/nêton~, _Cael._ 281b, 25. ~ei to\ age/nêton a/phtharton
kai\ to\ a/phtharton age/nêton, ana/gkê kai\ to\ "aï/dion"
hekate/rô| akolouthei=n, kai\ ei/te ti age/nêton, aï/dion, ei/te ti
a/phtharton, aï/dion ktl.~, _Cael._ 282a, 31 ff. Thus too ~nou=s~
(~apathê/s~) as uncreated is everlasting and imperishable (see
Zeller, _Sitzb. B. Ak._ 1882, p. 1044 f.). It belongs to the
imperishable ~ousi/ai~, which as such are ~ti/miai kai\ _thei=ai_~,
_PA._ 644b, 22 ff.]
[26\14: ~ho nou=s hupome/nei~ at the separation, _Meta._ 1070a,
25-6. More strictly this applies to the ~nou=s apathê/s
(poiêtiko/s)~. While the ~nou=s pathêtiko/s~ (whose relation to the
~nou=s poiêtiko/s~ remains most obscure) is ~phtharto/s~, we hear of
the ~nou=s poiêtiko/s~ that it is ~_chôristhei\s_ mo/non tou=to
ho/per eti/, kai\ tou=to mo/non atha/naton kai\ aï/dion~, _de An._
430a, 10-25.]
[27\14: _de An._ 408b, 18 ff.: ~nou=s ou phthei/retai~, nor ~hupo\
tê=s en tô=| gê/ra| amaurô/seôs . . . to\ noei=n kai\ to\ theôrei=n
marai/netai~ (in old age) ~a/llou tinos e/sô phtheirome/nou~ (?
nothing perishes within ~to\ noei=n~--read ~en hô=|~ as in l. 23 and
understand: ~a/llou tino\s en hô=| to\ noei=n = ho nou=s, e/nesti~,
i.e. the whole living man), ~auto\ de\ apathe/s estin~ (just as
~nou=s~ is always ~analloi/ôton~, even its ~no/êsis~ is no
~ki/nêsis~, and the ~lê=psis tê=s epistê/mês~ makes no ~alloi/ôsis~
for it: _de An._ 407a, 32; _Ph._ 247a, 28; b, 1 ff.; 20 ff.), ~to\
de\ dianoei=sthai~ (thinking and judging) ~kai\ philei=n ê\ misei=n
ouk e/stin ekei/nou pa/thê, alla\ tou=de tou= e/chontos ekei=no,
hê=| ekei=no e/chei. dio\ kai\ tou/tou phtheirome/nou ou/te
mnêmoneu/ei ou/te philei=, ou ga\r ekei/nou ê=n, alla\ tou= koi/nou~
(that which had once been associated with the ~nou=s~), ~ho\
apo/lôlen; ho de\ nou=s i/sôs theio/tero/n ti kai\ apathe/s estin~.
In its separate existence ~nou=s~ has no memory--this at least is
meant by ~ou mnêmoneu/omen~, _de An._ 430a, 23, however we may be
inclined to interpret the rest of the sentence.]
[28\14: Particularly in the ~Eu/dêmos~ (_frr._ 31-40 [37-44]),
probably also in the ~Protreptiko/s~.]
[29\14: For this must be the meaning of _fr._ 36 = 44 (~Eu/d.~)--the
~dai/môn~ is the soul itself; cf. 35 [41].]
[30\14: _de An._ 407b, 13-26; 414a, 19-27.--And yet it must be
admitted that the ~nou=s~ of Aristotle is itself a ~tucho/n~ within
another ~tucho/n~--not indeed as a separate entity with any
qualities set in a fortuitous vessel of perhaps discordant qualities
that do not fit it (which acc. to the ~Puthago/reios mu=thos~ was
true of the ~psuchê/~ in the ~sô=ma~)--but at any rate set within an
animated individual with quite definite qualities as a stranger,
itself devoid of all definite quality and therefore not capable of
having a character specially fitting that individual in which it is
placed. Thus, after all, the Aristotelian ~mu=thos~ about the
~nou=s~ betrays its origin from the ~mu=thoi~ of old theology.]
{511}
[31\14: It is only as an argumentum ad hominem that the view is
suggested on one occasion, that ~be/ltion tô=| nô=| mê\ meta\
sô/matos ei=nai (katha/per ei/ôthe/ te le/gesthai kai\ polloi=s
sundokei=)~, _de An._ 407b, 4.]
[32\14: _EN._ x, 7-9.--~dokei= hê philosophi/a thaumasta\s hêdona\s
e/chein kathario/têti kai\ tô=| bebai/ô|. eu/logon de\ _toi=s
eido/si_ tô=n zêtou/ntôn hêdi/ô tê\n diagôgê\n ei=nai~, 1177a, 26.
The ~sopho/s~ requires no ~su/nergoi~ (as the ~sô/phrôn~ and the
~andrei=os~ do, and is ~autarke/statos~ in himself. The activity of
~nou=s~ is the most valuable as being ~theôrêtikê/~ and because
~par' hautê\n oude/nos ephi/etai te/lous~. A sufficiently long life
of the theoretic activity of ~nou=s~ is ~telei/a eudaimoni/a
anthrô/pou~--indeed, this is no longer an ~anthrô/pinos bi/os~, but
rather ~krei/ttôn ê\ kat' a/nthrôpon~--a ~thei=os bi/os~ as ~nou=s
thei=o/n ti en anthrô/pô| hupa/rchei~. Therefore man must not
~anthrô/pina phronei=n~ but ~eph' ho/son ende/chetai athanati/zein~
(be immortal already in this life) ~kai\ pa/nta poiei=n pro\s to\
zê=n kata\ to\ kra/tiston tô=n en hautô=|~ (1177b, 31 ff.). This
~telei/a eudaimoni/a~, as a ~theôrêtikê\ ene/rgeia~, brings the
thinkers near to the _gods_ whose life does not consist in
~pra/ttein~ (not even virtuous) or ~poiei=n~ but in pure ~theôri/a~,
and this can be so with the life of man (alone among the ~zô=|a~)
~eph' ho/son homoi/ôma/ ti tê=s toiau/tês (theôrêtikê=s) energei/as
hupa/rchei~ (1178b, 7-32). Nowhere do we meet with so much as the
shadow of an idea that the ~eudaimoni/a~ of the ~theôrêtiko\s bi/os~
can only become ~telei/a~ in "another" world, or is conceivable as
existing elsewhere than in the life on earth. The only condition for
~telei/a eudaimoni/a~ that is made is ~mê=kos bi/ou te/leion~
(1177b, 25)--nothing lying outside or beyond this life. The
~theôrêtiko\s bi/os~ has its complete and final development here
upon earth.--~te/leios bi/os~ is mentioned as necessary for the
obtaining of ~eudaimoni/a~, _EN._ 1100a, 5; 1101a, 16. But
~eudaimoni/a~ is completely confined within the limits of earthly
life: to call a dead man ~eudai/mona~ would be ~pantelô=s a/topon~,
for he lacks the ~ene/rgeia~ which is the essence of
~eudaimoni/a~--only a mere shadow of sensation can belong to the
~kekmêko/tes~ (almost the Homeric conception) 1100a, 11-29; 1101a,
22-b, 9.--Since it is impossible for the individual to enjoy an
unending permanence and share in ~to\ aei\ kai\ thei=on~, it follows
that the continuation of the individual after death consists only in
the continuance of the ~ei/dos~--not of the ~auto/~ (which perishes)
but only of the ~hoi=on auto/~ which persists in the series of
creatures propagated on earth: _de An._ 415a, 28-b, 7; _GA._ 731a,
24-b, 1. (Borrowed from the observations of Plato, _Smp._ 206 C-207
A; cf. also _Lg._ 721 C, 773 E; Philo, _Incor. Mund._ 8, ii, p. 495
M., after Kritolaos.) It was much easier for Aristotle to take this
conception seriously than it was for Plato with his particular
outlook: only for the passing requirements of his dialogue does
Plato adopt the Herakleitean view and expand it: see above, chap.
xi, n. 16.]
[33\14: ~oi=mai de\ tou= ginô/skein ta\ o/nta kai\ phronei=n
aphairethe/ntos _ou bi/on alla\ chro/non_ ei=nai tê\n athanasi/an~,
Plu., _Is. et Os._ i, fin., p. 351 E. Origen (_Cels._ iii, 80, p.
359 Lom.) draws a clear distinction between the ~athanasi/a tê=s
psuchê=s~ of Platonic doctrine and the Stoic ~epidiamonê\ tê=s
psuchê=s~ on the one hand--and this Aristotelian doctrine of the
~tou= nou= athanasi/a: hoi peisthe/ntes peri\ tou= thu/rathen nou=
hôs _athana/tou_ (thana/tou~ Edd.) ~_kai\ mo/nou_ (kainou=~ Edd.)
~diagôgê\n (= bi/on) e/xontos~ (--this is how the passage should be
read).]
[34\14: Theophrastos discussed (by the method of ~apori/ai~
fashionable with the school) the obscurities and difficulties
inherent in the doctrine of ~nou=s~, particularly of the
reduplicated ~nou=s~, the ~poiêtiko/s~ and the ~pathêtiko/s~. True
to his character, however, he adheres to the fixed dogma of his
school of the ~nou=s chôristo/s~ which ~e/xôthen ô\n kai\ hô/sper
{512} epi/thetos~ is ~ho/môs su/mphutos~ with man and being
~age/nnêtos~ is also ~a/phthartos~: _Frag._ 53b, p. 226 ff.; 53, p.
176 Wim. (~theôri/a~ belongs to ~nou=s, thigo/nti kai\ hoi=on
hapsame/nô|~, and is therefore without ~apa/tê~, _fr._ 12, § 26.
The ~nou=s~ is ~krei=tto/n ti me/ros [tê=s psychê=s] kai\
theio/teron~, _fr._ 53. To the ~nou=s~ and its ~theôri/a~ we must
suppose the ~kata\ du/namin homoiou=sthai theô=|~ to refer--for this
is the teaching of Thphr. also: Jul., _Or._ vi, p. 185 A.) Nowhere
is there any indication that for him the immortality of ~nou=s~ had
the slightest importance for this life and its conduct. Nor has it
any in the ethical doctrine of the very theologically inclined
Eudemos. Here the aim of life--the ~aretê\ te/leios~ which is
~kalolagathi/a~--is said to be ~hê tou= theou= theôri/a~ which is
carried on by the ~nou=s, to\ en êmi=n thei=on~, 1248a, 27; in this
process it is best ~hê/kista aistha/nesthai tou= a/llou me/rous tê=s
psuchê=s~, 1249b, 22. For the sake of ~to\ gnôri/zein~ man wishes
~zê=n aei\~, 1245a, 9--but upon earth and in the body: there is no
thought of the other world. (This would have been quite natural and
to be expected of this semi-theological thinker who, e.g. speaks
quite seriously of the separability of ~nou=s~ from the
~lo/gos~--the ~a/llo me/ros tê=s psuchê=s~--in bodily life and of
its higher intuition in _enthousiasmos_ and veracious dreaming:
1214a, 23; 1225a, 28; 1248a, 40.)--To this first generation of
Peripatetics belong also Aristoxenos and Dikaiarchos who did not
recognize _any_ peculiar substance of the "soul" apart from the
"harmony" brought about by the mixture of bodily material. Dik.
~anê/|rêke tê\n ho/lên hupo/stasin tê=s psuchê=s~: Atticus ap. Eus.,
_PE._ xv, 810 A. Aristox. and Dik. nullum omnino animum esse
dixerunt Cic. _TD._ 1, 51: 21; 41, etc.; Dik. (in the ~Lesbiakoi\
lo/goi~) expressly controverted the doctrine of immortality, _TD._
i, 77. (It remains very remarkable that Dik. who naturally knew
nothing of a _separabilis animus_, _TD._ i, 21, nevertheless,
believed not merely in _mantic_ dreams--that would be just
intelligible, ~e/chei ga/r tina lo/gon~, Arist., _P. Nat._ 462b
ff.--but also in the prophetic power of ~enthousiasmo/s~, Cic.,
_Div._ i, 5; 113; _Dox._ 416a, which invariably presupposes the
dogma of a special substance of the "soul" and its separability from
the body.)--Straton "the naturalist" (_d._ 270), for whom the soul
is an undivided force, inseparable from the body and the
~aisthê/seis~, gave up completely the belief in the ~nou=s
chôristo/s~ of Aristotle: he cannot possibly have held any doctrine
of immortality in any form or under any limitations.--Then follows
the period of pure scholarship when the Peripatetic school almost
gave up philosophy. With the return to the study of the master's
writings (from the time of Aristonikos) they gained a new lease of
life. The problems of the parts of the soul, the relation of ~nou=s~
to the soul (and to the ~nou=s pathêtiko/s~) were discussed once
more. It became more and more common, however, to set aside the
~nou=s thu/rathen epeisiô/n~ (cf. the definition of the soul given
by Andronikos ap. Galen ~p. t. tê=s psuchê=s êthô=n~, iv, 782 f.,
K.; Themist., _de An._ ii, 56, 11; 59, 6 Sp.). This meant the denial
of immortality (which belonged to ~nou=s~ only): e.g. by Boëthos:
Simp., _de An._ p. 247, 24 ff. Hayd. [_Sto. Vet._ iii, 267 Arn.]. A
different view again, and one which even went beyond Aristotle, was
held by Kratippos, the contemporary of Boëthos: Cic., _Div._ i, 70;
cf. 5; 113. Alexander of Aphrodisias the great ~exêgêtê/s~
absolutely banished the ~nou=s poiêtiko/s~ from the human soul.
(This is the divine ~nou=s~, which is perpetually ~nou=s~ and
~noêto\n energei/a|~, and that, too, already ~pro\ tou= noei=sthai~
by the ~huliko\s nou=s~ of man. It enters into the latter
~thu/rathen~--though not locally, for it is incapable of change of
place, p. 113, 18 f.--with the individual act of ~noei=n~ by the
~nou=s huliko/s~, but it never becomes a ~mo/rion kai\ du/nami/s tis
tê=s {513} hêmete/ras psuchê=s~: Alex. _de An._, p. 107-9; p. 90
Br.). For him ~nou=s~ is ~chôristo/s~ and ~atha/natos, apathê/s~,
etc., whereas the human soul exactly like the ~ei=dos~ of its
~sô=ma~ from which it is ~achôristo/s~ perishes at death together
with its ~nou=s huliko/s~, completely: ~sumphthei/retai tô=|
sô/mati~, _de An._, p. 21, 22 f.; p. 90, 16 f. The individual soul
thus perishes: the imperishable ~nou=s~ had not communicated itself
to the individual.--The indestructibility of the individual ~nou=s~
of man (and this was indubitably what Aristotle himself taught), a
doctrine derived not from experience but from pure logical
inference, had in reality no serious significance for the general
teaching of the Peripatetics so long as they preserved their
independence. Finally, indeed, they too were swallowed up in the
ferment of Neoplatonism.]
[35\14: ~he/xis, phu/sis, a/logos psuchê/, psuchê\ lo/gon e/chousa
kai\ dia/noian~, Plu., _Virt. Mor._ 451 BC and A. Through all these
and all things in which these are--~diê/kei ho nou=s~, D.L. vii, 138
f. [ii, p. 192 Arn.].]
[36\14: Our soul an ~apo/spasma~ of the ~e/mpsuchos ko/smos~, D.L.
vii, 143 [ii, 191 Arn.]. We often find the soul of man called an
~apo/spasma tou= theou= (Dio/s), thei/a apo/moira, apo/rroia~ (see
Gataker on M. Ant., pp. 48, 211; Ed. 1652)--and often even ~theo/s~
(see Bonhöffer, _Epiktet u. d. Stoa_, p. 76 f.).]
[37\14: ~(hê psuchê\) araio/teron pneu=ma tê=s phu/seôs kai\
leptome/resteron . . . ~ Chrysipp. ap. Plu., _Stoic. Rep._ 41, p.
1052 F [ii, 222 Arn.]. "Nature" is ~pneu=ma~ that has become moist,
soul the same ~pneu=ma~ which has remained dry (Galen, iv, 783 f. K.
[p. 218 Arn.]).]
[38\14: The ~bre/phos~ is created as a ~phu/ton~, and only
afterwards becomes a ~zô=|on~ by ~peri/psuxis~ (derivation of
~psuchê/~ hence!). Chrysipp. ap. Plu., _Stoic. Rep._ 1052 F [p. 222
Arn.]. Thus comes ~ek phu/seôs psuchê/~, Plu., _Prim. Frig._ ii, p.
946 C.]
[39\14: It would almost be possible to employ the semi-Stoic
language of Philo to describe the soul as conceived by this Stoic
Pantheism: ~tê=s thei/as psuchê=s apo/spasma _ou diaireto/n_
(te/mnetai ga\r oude\n tou= thei/ou kat' apa/rtêsin, alla\ mo/non
ektei/netai)~, _Q. Det. Pot. Insid._, 24, i, p. 209 M. But in
orthodox Stoic doctrine the idea prevails that the individual
~apospa/smata~ are completely detached from the universal
~thei=on~--but at the same time without denial of ultimate connexion
with the "All" and the "One".]
[40\14: Acc. to the older Stoical doctrine as systematized by
Chrysippos the soul is absolutely simple and unified, having sprung
from the universal Reason of God which contains no ~a/logon~. Its
impulses (~hormai/~) must on this view be rational just as much as
its willed decisions (~kri/seis~): it is affected from without by
~phu/sis~, which, being itself a development of the highest reason,
God, can only be good and rational. It is quite impossible to
conceive how, on the principles of the older Stoicism, erroneous
judgment or excessive and evil impulses could arise. ~hê tê=s
kaki/as ge/nesis~ is rendered unintelligible as Poseidonios
maintains in opposition to the subtle observations of Chrysipp. on
this head (see Schmekel, _Phil. d. mittl. Stoa_, p. 327 ff.).]
[41\14: ~akolou/thôs tê=| phu/sei zê=n~ (but our ~phu/seis~ are
~me/rê tê=s tou= ho/lou~), i.e. in harmony with the ~koi/nos no/mos
ho/sper esti\n ho ortho\s lo/gos ho dia\ pa/ntôn ercho/menos, ho
auto\s ô\n tô=| Dii/, kathêgemo/ni tou/tô| tê=s tô=n ho/lôn
dioikê/seôs o/nti~, Chrysipp. ap. D.L. vii, 87-8 [iii, 3 Arn.]. This
obedience to the rational order and governance of the world--the
_deum sequere_, Sen., _VB._ 15, 5; _Ep._ 16, 5; ~he/pesthai
theoi=s~, Epict. i, 12, 5, etc.--is more often regarded as a passive
attitude of self-abandonment adopted consciously and with
~sugkata/thesis: chrô= moi loipo\n eis ho\ a\n the/lê|s.
homognômonô= soi, so/s eimi ktl.~, Epict. ii, 16, 42. ~the/le
gi/nesthai ta\ {514} gino/mena hôs gi/netai, kai\ euroê/seis~ (this
sounds very like "make God's will your own will"), _Ench._ 8. Much
the same idea occurs already in the lines of Kleanthes ~a/gou de/ m'
hô= Zeu= kai\ su/ g' hê Peprôme/nê ktl.~ [i, 118 Arn.]. But such
"affirmation of the universe", understood in the full pantheistic
sense (cf. Kleanthes ~tê\n koinê\n mo/nên ekde/chetai phu/sin hê=|
dei= akolouthei=n, ouke/ti de\ kai\ tê\n epi\ me/rous~, D.L. vii, 89
[i, 126 Arn.]), could not lead to an ethical teaching of active
character and concrete substance.]
[42\14: The ~sopho/s~ is ~eleu/theros; ei=nai ga\r tê\n eleutheri/an
exousi/an autopragi/as~, D.L. vii, 121. Laws and constitutions do
not apply to him: Cic., _Ac. Pri._ ii, 136.]
[43\14: Enemies and strangers are ~mê\ spoudai=oi~ to one
another--~poli=tai kai\ phi/loi kai\ oikei=oi hoi spoudai=oi
mo/non~. Zeno, ~en tê=| Politei/a|~, ap. D.L. vii, 32-3 [i, 54
Arn.].]
[44\14: ~ho par' heka/stô| dai/môn~ which one must keep in harmony
~pro\s tê\n tou= tô=n ho/lôn dioikêtou= bou/lêsin~, D.L. vii, 88,
after Chrysipp. [iii, 4 Arn.]. In the later Stoic literature, the
only part of it which has come down to us, we often hear of this
~dai/môn~ of the individual--sacer intra nos spiritus (Sen., Epict.,
M. Ant.: see Bonhöffer, _Epiktet_, 83). It is generally spoken of in
language that seems to regard it as something _separable_ from the
man or his soul, including the ~hêgemoniko/n~; Zeus ~pare/stêsen
_epi/tropon_ heka/stô| to\n heka/stou dai/mona kai\ pare/dôke
phula/ssein auto\n autô=| ktl.~, Epict. i, 14, 12. ~ho dai/môn o\n
heka/stô| _prosta/tên_ kai\ hêgemo/na ho Zeu\s e/dôken~, M. Ant. v,
27. ~ana/krinon to\ daimo/nion~, Epict. iii, 22, 53 (one can ask
questions of it, as Sokrates did of his ~daimo/nion~, as something
other and different from oneself). This ~dai/môn~ then does not seem
to be simply identifiable with the "soul" of man like the daimon in
man of which the _theologians_ speak. It is conceived and spoken of
in language that suggests rather the "protecting spirit" of a man as
known to popular belief (cf. now Usener, _Götternamen_, 294 ff.).
~ha/panti dai/môn andri\ sumpari/statai euthu\s genome/nô|
mustagôgo\s tou= bi/ou~, Menand. 550 K. (where the idea of _two_
daimonic partners in the life of man is already rejected: Eukleides
Socr. had spoken of such, cf. Censor., _DN._ iii, 3, and in a
different way again Phocyl., _fr._ 15). Plato himself speaks (with a
~le/getai~) of the ~dai/môn ho/sper zô=nta eilê/chei~ (and guides
the departed soul into Hades): _Phd._ 107 D. The idea, however, must
have been much older: it appears fairly clearly expressed in
Pindar's words, _O._ xiii, 28 ~(Zeu= pa/têr), Xeno/phôntos eu/thune
dai/monos ou=ron~, where the transition to the meaning "fate" for
the word ~dai/môn~ has not yet been completed. Later (with the
Tragedians and other poets) this use became very common, but even
then still presupposes the belief in such personal daimonic partners
in the life of man: the use would have been quite impossible
otherwise. (~dai/môn = po/tmos~, Pi., _P._ v, 121 f., and already in
Thgn. 161, 163. When Herakleitos says ~ê=thos anthrô/pô| dai/môn~,
_fr._ 121 By., 119 D. he uses ~dai/môn~ in the sense of fortune in
life. The word means both ~ê=thos~ and condition of life at the same
time in Pl., _Rp._ 617 E, ~ouch huma=s dai/môn lê/xetai, all'
humei=s dai/mona hairê/sesthe~, where the derivation of the
metaphorical use of the word ~dai/môn~ from a belief in a special
daimon belonging to the individual man can still be seen plainly.
See also [Lys.] _Epit._ (2), 78. But the metaphorical use comes as
early as ~Th~ 166, ~pa/ros toi dai/mona dô/sô = po/tmon
ephê/sô~.)--The personal existence of the daimon is still far
removed from all danger of such abstraction in a very remarkable
case: in Halikarnassos Poseidonios and his ~e/kgonoi~ decide that on
the first day of the month they will offer ~Dai/moni agathô=|
Poseidôni/ou . . . krio/n~ (_Gr. Ins. in Br. Mus._ {515} iv, 1, n.
896, p. 70, l. 35. The inscr. seems to date from the third century
B.C.). Here then offering is made to the ~agatho\s dai/môn~ (see
above, chap. v, n. 133) of the _living_, just as offering was made
on birthdays, and at other times also, to the _genius_ of Romans;
~ag. d.~ is here clearly equivalent to _genius_. Apollo whose advice
had been sought at his oracle had expressly enjoined (ib., l. 9) ~.
. . tima=n kai\ hila/skesthai kai\ agatho\n dai/mona Poseidôni/ou
kai\ Go/rgidos~ (the latter, P.'s mother, seems to have been already
dead: l. 34).--This special ~dai/môn~ attached to individuals with
whom it can be contrasted (as Brutus can be with his ~dai/môn
kako/s~: Plu., _Brut._ 36) is distinct from the individual's
~psuchê/~, though it is natural to suppose that it may have arisen
from the projection of the ~psuchê/~--conceived as very
independent--outside the man himself, in which it would again
resemble the Roman _genius_. (The daimonic ~phu/lakes~ of Hesiod
[cf. above, p. 67 ff.], belong to quite a different range of ideas.)
At any rate the Stoics had this analogous popular conception in mind
when they spoke of the ~par' heka/stô| dai/môn~ as something
different from the man himself and his ~hêgemoniko/n~. They use it,
however, only as a figure of speech. The ~dai/môn~ of the individual
really means for them "the original, ideal personality as contrasted
with the empirical personality" (as Bonhöffer very rightly puts it:
_Epikt._ 84)--the character the man already _is_ ideally but must
_become_ actually (~ge/noi' hoi=os essi/ . . .~). Thus the ~dai/môn~
is distinct from the ~psuchê/ (dia/noia)~ and yet identical with it.
It is a semi-allegorical play upon the idea of the ~dai/môn~ as
individual genius and at the same time as crown or summit of the
human personality--just as Plato had used the word already
incidentally, _Tim._ 90 A. Finally--for the Stoics did not seriously
wish to establish the existence of an independent protecting deity
that enters man from without and rules over him--the ~hêgemoniko/n~
is the same as the ~dai/môn~. Thus in M. Ant. iv, 27, the ~dai/môn~
is completely identical with the ~apo/spasma Dio/s~, and the
~heka/stou nou=s kai\ lo/gos~ (cf. also iii, 3 fin.; ii, 13; 17;
iii, 7, ~to\n heautou= nou=n kai\ dai/mona~). The fact, however,
that this ~apo/spasma tou= theou=~ can be called a ~dai/môn~ bears
witness to a tendency to conceive the soul-spirit as something
independent and more cut off and separated from the common and
original source of divinity than was possible for Stoic pantheism of
the stricter sort (to which the terms ~apo/spasma, apo/rroia tou=
theou=~ were more apt). A decided approximation was thus made to the
theological idea of the "soul" as an individual daimon which
persists in its separate existence. To this view Poseidonios went
over completely: he regards the individual ~dai/môn~ that lives in
man as ~suggenê\s ô\n tô=| to\n ho/lon ko/smon dioikou=nti~ (Pos.
ap. Gal. v, 469), and no longer as the dependent ~apo/spasma~ of the
latter, but as one of many independent and individually
characterized spirits that have lived from all time in the air and
enter into man at birth. (See Bonhöffer, _Epikt._ 79-80, and also
Schmekel, _Phil. d. mittl. Stoa_, 249 ff., 256.)]
[45\14: ~ho tha/natos esti chôrismo\s psuchê=s apo\ sô/matos . . .~
Chrysipp. ap. Nemes., _NH._, p. 81 Matth.; Zeno and Chrysipp. ap.
Tert., _An._ 5 [ii, 219 Arn.].]
[46\14: Everything comes into being and perishes, including the
gods, ~ho de\ Zeu\s mo/nos aï/dio/s esti~, Chrysipp. ap. Plu., _Sto.
Rep._ 38, p. 1052 A; _Comm. Not._ 31, p. 1075 A ff. [ii, 309
Arn.].--~epidiamonê\~ but not ~athanasi/a~ of the human soul [ib.,
223].]
[47\14: ~_Klea/nthês_ me\n ou=n pa/sas (ta\s psucha\s) epidiame/nein
(le/gei) me/chri tê=s ekpurô/seôs, _Chru/sippos_ de\ ta\s tô=n
sophô=n mo/non~, D.L. vii, 157. {516} A statement often repeated
without mention of the two authorities: Arius Did. ap. Eus., _PE._
15, 20, 6, p. 822 **A-C (the ~psuchai\ tô=n aphro/nôn kai\ alo/gôn
**zô/|ôn~ perish immediately with the death of the body, C) and
others [ii, 223 Arn.]. Chrysippos' doctrine comes also in Tac.,
_Agr._ 46, si ut sapientibus placet non cum corpore extinguuntur
magnae animae (~hai mega/lai psuchai/~, Plu., _Def. Or._ 18, p. 419
f.); cf. omnium quidem animos immortalis esse sed fortium bonorumque
divinos, Cic., _Leg._ ii, 27, not quite accurately put.]
[48\14: The ~_astheneste/ra_ psuchê/ (hau/tê de/ esti tô=n
apaideu/tôn)~ perishes sooner, ~hê de\ _ischurote/ra_, hoi=a esti\
peri\ tou\s sophou/s~ remains ~me/chri tê=s ekpurô/seôs~, [Plu.]
_Plac. Phil._, 4, 7 ap. _Dox._ 393a.]
[49\14: The predominance of the materialistic point of view is
remarkable in those _Stoici_ who acc. to Seneca, _Ep._ 57, 7,
existimant animum hominis magno pondere extriti permanere non posse
et statim spargi, quia non fuerit illi exitus liber (which reminds
us of the popular belief that the soul of one who has died in a high
wind ~euthu\s diapephu/sêtai kai\ apo/lôlen~, Pl., _Phd._ 70 A, 80
D, see above, chap. xiii, n. 5).]
[50\14: ~ou ta\ sô/mata ta\s psucha\s sune/chei all' hai psuchai\
ta\ sô/mata, hô/sper kai\ hê ko/lla kai\ heautê\n kai\ ta\ ekto\s
kratei=~, Poseidon. ap. Ach. Tat., _Isag._, p. 133 E Petav.,
borrowed from Arist. (_de An._ 1, 5, 411b, 7), but a thoroughly
Stoic idea as contrasted with Epicurean doctrine (see Heinze,
_Xenokrates_, 100 f.).]
[51\14: 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\14: ~--kai\ ga\r oude\ ta\s psucha\s e/nestin huponoê=sai ka/tô
pherome/nas. leptomerei=s ga\r ou=sai eis tou\s a/nô ma=llon to/pous
kouphophorou=sin~, 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: ~oudei\s Ha/idês, oud' Ache/rôn,
oude\ Kôkuto/s ktl.~, 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 ~ha/|dês~ 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, ~ho pachumere/statos kai\ prosgeio/tatos aê/r~
(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 ~aê/r~ (distinguished from the higher regions of the air) =
~ha/|dês~, 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\14: 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: ~eis to\n ae/ra methi/stasthai~ said of the departed
souls, M. Ant. iv, 21. ~en tô=| perie/chonti . . . diame/nein ta\s
tô=n apothano/ntôn psucha/s~, 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.: ~sphairoeidei=s~--as fiery ~mete/ôra--ta\s psucha\s
{517} meta\ tha/naton gi/nesthai~, 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 ~to\n hupo\ selê/nên to/pon~ (S.E., _M._
ix, 73) as suitable for divine but not perfect creatures. It is the
souls who are meant when people speak of ~dai/mones~ (S.E. § 74), or
~hê/rôes~ (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 ~aithe/rion sô=ma~
(Philop.)--~phôtoeidê/s~, 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 ~eis to\n
ho/moion aithe/ra~ 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 ~o/gkoi~ 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\14: 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\14: ~apo/spasma tou= theou=~ [i, 36 Arn.].]
[56\14: 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
~mê=kos bi/ou te/leiou~ 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\14: 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 ~pneu=ma
e/nthermon~ as the older Stoa had taught (see Schmekel, _Philos. d.
mittl. Stoa_, 324 f.).]
[58\14: ~phu/sis~ and ~psuchê/~: 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\14: Panaitios denied not merely the immortality but even the
~diamonê/~ 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 ~zô=|on~--an argument to which Pan. on the whole
yielded.]
[60\14: Poseidonios distinguished in the human soul not three parts
but three ~duna/meis mia=s ousi/as ek tê=s kardi/as hormôme/nês~
(Gal. v, 515), namely, the Platonic three, the ~logistiko/n,
thumoeide/s, epithumêtiko/n~ (Gal. v, 476). The last two are the
~duna/meis a/logoi~ (they only give ~phantasi/ai~ the special forms
taken by their impulses: Gal. v, 474, 399). The ~pa/thê~ are not
judgments nor the consequences of judgment but the motions
(~kinê/seis~) of these ~duna/meis a/logoi~ (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 ~a/logon kai\ kako/daimon kai\
_a/theon_~ in addition to the ~dai/môn suggenê\s tô=| to\n ho/lon
ko/smon dioikou=nti~: Gal. v, 469 f. How, indeed, this is possible
when the soul is a single ~ousi/a~ and in its nature nothing but
divine ~pneu=ma~ 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. ~gegone/nai tê\n psuchê\n kai\
metageneste/ran ei=nai [tou= sô/matos]~, 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-~dai/môn~ was in existence before its incarnation it can
presumably only enter the body with the conception of the individual
life ~thu/rathen~, _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 ~ensôma/tôsis~, 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 ~ekpu/rôsis~ (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 ~periodikê\ paliggenesi/a~ (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 ~athanasi/a~ for the individual: the
individual life has been interrupted and is separated from its
~apokata/stasis~ by a long interval of time.--There is no
satisfactory reason for assigning to Pos. the belief in a series of
~metensômatô/seis~ 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 ~ekpu/rôsis~. But
the dubious accounts given by many ~doxogra/phoi~ of Stoic teaching
on the question of the ~metaggismo\s psuchô=n~ 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.]
[61\14: Schmekel (_Phil. d. mittl. Stoa_, 1892) maintains
convincingly that Panaitios was led to his view of the nature and
fate of the soul chiefly by the polemic of Karneades against the
dogmatic philosophers and particularly the Stoics. It is less
certain that Poseidonios and his heterodox views are influenced by
respect for Karneades. It is certain, however, that Pos. differs
from Chrysipp., and still more from Panaitios. There is thus an
indirect connexion between him and Karneades, to whose criticisms
Panaitios had in the most essential points given way.]
[62\14: That Pos. is being used in the first book of _Tusc. Disp._
is admitted on all hands (as to the extent of that use conjecture
may indeed be various). It is at least very possible in the case of
_Somn. Scip._ (see Corssen, _Pos._ 40 ff.).--The attraction of such
theories of immortality {520} remained an aesthetic one with Cicero
(and probably among all the cultured of his age and social circle).
Where he is not speaking rhetorically or in pursuance of a literary
pose--in his letters esp.--he shows no trace of the conviction that
he defends at other times with so much ardour (see Boissier, _Rel.
rom. d'Aug. aux Ant._ i, 58 f.).]
[63\14: ~ou kata\ psilê\n para/taxin, alla\ lelogisme/nôs kai\
semnô=s~ though not always quite ~atragô/|dôs~ (M. Ant. xi, 3).]
[64\14: Julius Kanus when condemned to death by Gaius only attempts
to _enquire_ whether there is any truth in the belief in
immortality: Sen., _Tr. An._ 14, 8-9. De natura animae et
dissociatione spiritus corporisque inquirebat Thrasea Paetus, before
his execution, with his instructor Demetrius the Cynic: Tac., _A._
xvi, 34. They have no firm conviction in these matters that might
serve to explain or account for their heroism (Cato reads the
_Phaedo_ before his suicide: Plu., _Cat. min._ 68, 70).]
[65\14: nos quoque felices animae et aeterna sortitae says the soul
of her father to Marcia: Sen., _C. ad Marc._ 26, 7, in antiqua
elementa vertemur at the ~ekpu/rôsis~.]
[66\14: Sen., _Ep._ 88, 34.]
[67\14: _bellum somnium_, Sen., _Ep._ 102, 2.]
[68\14: Where Seneca admits more positive conceptions of a life
after death he never goes beyond a fortasse, si modo vera sapientium
fama est (_Ep._ 63, 16); a deliberate concession to the consensus
hominum (_Ep._ 117, 6) or the opiniones magnorum virorum rem
gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium (_Ep._ 102, 3).
Following the conventional style of consolatory discourses he gives
such expressions a more vivid turn in the _Consolationes_: e.g.
_Marc._ 25, 1 ff.; _Helv._ 11, 7; _Polyb._ 9, 8. But even there the
idea of _personal_ immortality hardly seems to be taken seriously.
In the same pieces death is commended simply as putting an end to
all pain, and, in fact, to all sensation: _Marc._ 19, 4-5. In death
we become again as we were before being born, _Marc._ 19, 5; cf.
_Ep._ 54, 4, mors est non esse, id quale sit iam scio. hoc erit post
me quod ante me fuit; and _Ep._ 77, 11, non eris: nec fuisti. So
that whether death is a _finis_ or a _transitus_, (_Prov._ 6, 6;
_Ep._ 65, 24), it is equally welcome to the wise man who has made
the most of his life, however short it may have been. Whether he
goes then to the gods or whether on the other hand nothing is left
of the mortal creature after death aeque magnum animum habebit
(_Ep._ 93, 10); cf. nunquam magis divinum est (pectus humanum) quam
ubi mortalitatem suam cogitat, et scit in hoc natum hominem ut vita
defungeretur cet., (_Ep._ 120, 14); ipsum perire non est magnum,
anima in expedito est habenda (_QN._ 6, 32, 5); to be ready is
everything.--Of the old Stoic dogmas the only one that seems to
remain certain for Seneca is that of ~paliggenesi/a~ at the new
creation of the world, _Ep._ 36, 10-11: mors intermittit vitam, non
eripit: venit iterum qui nos in lucem reponat dies; but that is not
in any way a consolation: multi recusarent nisi oblitos reduceret.
Consciousness ceases with the coming of death in this world-period.]
[69\14: It is very rarely that the utterances of the Emperor on the
subject of what happens after death resemble those of a convinced
Stoic of the old school. The souls are all parts of the one ~noera\
psuchê/~ of the world which though extended over so many individual
souls yet remains a unity (ix, 8; xii, 30). After death the
individual soul will survive for a period in the air until it is
merged into the universal soul ~eis to\n tô=n ho/lôn spermatiko\n
lo/gon~ (iv, 21). This implies the survival of the personal self for
an undefined period, but it is {521} not a fixed conviction of M.
Ant. As a rule he allows the choice between ~sbe/sis ê\
meta/stasis~, i.e. immediate extinction and merging of the
individual soul (Panait.) or its removal into a temporary abode of
the souls in the air (~hai eis to\n ae/ra methista/menai psuchai/~,
iv, 21; cf. v, 53). Or else the choice is between ~sbe/sis,
meta/stasis~ (both in agreement with the Stoic doctrine of the
~he/nôsis~ of the soul) or ~skedasmo/s~ of the soul-elements, in
case the atomists are right (vii, 32; viii, 25; vi, 24)--a dilemma
which really comes down to ~skedasmo/s~ or ~sbe/sis (= lêphthê=nai
eis tou\s ko/smou spermatikou\s lo/gous~); and ~meta/stasis~ falls
out. This is probably the meaning also of x, 7: ~ê/toi skedasmo\s
stoichei/ôn ê\ _tropê/_~ (in which ~to\ pneumatiko/n~ disappears
~eis to\ aerô=des~) and ~tropê/~ only of the last ~pneumatiko/n~
that man preserves in himself: for here (at the end of the chapter)
the identity of the individual soul with itself is given up in the
Herakleitean manner (see above, p. 370). Sometimes the choice is
presented between ~anaisthêsi/a~ or ~he/teros bi/os~ after death
(iii, 3) or ~ai/sthêsis heteroi/a~ in an ~alloi=on zô=|on~ (viii,
58). This is no allusion to metempsychosis (in which the envelope
into which the soul goes is another but its ~ai/sthêsis~ does not
become ~heteroi/a~): it means the turning of the _soul-pneuma_,
exhaled in death, to new forms of life united to the previous forms
by no identity of soul-personality. In this case we can indeed say
~tou= zê=n ou pau/sê|~: but there can be no idea of the survival of
the personal ego. ~hê tô=n ho/lôn phu/sis~ exchanges and
redistributes its elements; all things are changing (viii, 6; ix,
28). The Emperor never seriously thinks of the survival of
personality; he seeks rather to inquire why things are as they are;
but he never doubts that as a matter of fact even the noblest of
mankind must also "go out" completely with death (xii, 5).
Everything changes and one thing perishes to make way for another
(xii, 21); and so each man must say to himself ~met' ou polu\
oudei\s oudamou= e/sê|~ (xii, 21; viii, 5). The wise man will say it
with calmness: his soul is ~he/toimos ea\n ê/dê apoluthê=nai de/ê|
tou= sô/matos . . .~ xi, 3. Living among men to whom his way of
thought is strange (~en tê=| diaphôni/a| tê=s sumbiô/seôs~) he sighs
at times ~tha=tton e/lthois, ô= tha/nate . . .~ ix, 3; cf.
Bonhöffer, _Epikt. u. d. Stoa_, 59 ff.]
[70\14: I shall die without resisting God ~eidô\s ho/ti to\
geno/menon kai\ phtharê=nai dei=. ou ga/r eimi aiô\n all'
a/nthrôpos, me/ros tô=n pa/ntôn hôs hô/ra hême/ras; enstê=nai/ me
dei= hôs tê\n hô/ran kai\ parelthei=n hôs hô/ran~, Epictet. ii, 5,
13. The present must make way for the future ~hi/n' hê peri/odos
anu/êtai tou= ko/smou~, ii, 17-18; iv, 1, 106. Death brings with it
not complete destruction, ~ouk apô/leian~, but ~tô=n prote/rôn eis
he/tera metabola/s~, iii, 24, 91-4. But the personality of the now
living individual does indeed perish completely in death.--Cf.
Bonhöffer, _Epiktet_, 65 f.; cf. also the same author's _Ethik des
Epiktet_, p. 26 ff., 52 (1894).]
[71\14: Cornutus ap. Stob., _Ecl._ i, 383, 24-384, 2 W.]
[72\14: The ~psuchê/~ a ~sô=ma~ (the only ~asô/maton~ is empty space
which is merely a passage way for the ~sô/mata~), D.L, x, 67 [p. 21
Us.]. It is a ~sô=ma leptomere/s, par' ho/lon to\ a/throisma~ (i.e.
of atoms to a body) ~paresparme/non, prosemphere/staton de\
pneu/mati thermou= tina kra=sin e/chonti~, D.L. x, 63. Cf. Lucr.
iii, 126 ff.; more precise is iii, 231-46. It is the ~a/throisma~
which ~tê\n psuchê\n stega/zei~, D.L. x, 64. vas quasi constitit
eius, Lucr. iii, 440, 555.]
[73\14: Lucr. iii, 94 ff., 117 ff.]
[74\14: The ~a/logon ho\ en tô=| loipô=| pare/spartai sô/mati, to\
de\ logiko\n en tô=| thô/raki~, Sch. D.L. x, 67 (p. 21 Us.), _fr._
312, 313 Us. _anima_ and _animus_, Lucr. iii, 136 ff. The _anima_,
though it is diminished {522} when the man loses his limbs (in which
it inheres), yet allows him to remain alive. The _animus_, however,
_vitai claustra coercens_, must not be diminished otherwise the
_anima_ escapes as well and the man dies: Lucr. iii, 396 ff. The
_animus_ with its perceptions is more independent of _anima_ and
_corpus_ than they are of it: Lucr. iii, 145 ff.]
[75\14: Lucr. iii, 421-4.]
[76\14: Lucr. iii, 445 ff.]
[77\14: The soul ~diaspei/retai, luome/nou tou= ho/lou
athroi/smatos~ and cannot retain any ~ai/sthêsis~ apart from its
~a/throisma~, D L. x, 65-6. The winds disperse it: Lucr. iii, 506
ff. ~kapnou= di/kên ski/dnatai~, Epicur. _fr._ 337. _ceu fumus_,
Lucr. iii, 446-583.]
[78\14: radicitus e vita se tollit et eicit, Lucr. iii, 877.]
[79\14: Lucr. iii, 854-60; 847-53.]
[80\14: ~oude\ taphê=s phrontiei=n (to\n sopho/n)~ _fr._ 578. Cf.
Lucr. iii, 870 ff. The way in which the body, deserted by its soul,
is buried or disposed of is of no consequence: Phld., _Mort._, p.
41-2 Mekl.]
[81\14: D.L. x, 124-5.]
[82\14: ~ho tha/natos oude\n pro\s hêma=s, to\ ga\r dialuthe\n
anaisthêtei=, to\ de\ anaisthêtou=n oude\n pro\s hêma=s~, Ep.,
_Sent._ ii; D.L. x, 139 (p. 71 Us.). Frequently repeated: see Usen.,
p. 391 f.]
[83\14: dolor and morbus, leti fabricator uterque, affect the soul
too, Lucr. iii, 459 ff., 470 ff., 484 ff. Nothing that can be broken
up into parts can be eternal; 640 ff., 667 ff. The chief argument:
quod cum corpore nascitur, cum corpore intereat necesse est, Ep.,
_fr._ 336. (They are identical in part with the arguments which
Karneades directed against the theory of the eternity and
indestructibility of the highest ~zô=|on~, God. Karn. must have got
them from Epicurus.)]
[84\14: Cf. Ep., _Sent._ xi, p. 73 f. Us.]
[85\14: To be able to see ~mêde\n pro\s hêma=s ei=nai to\n
tha/naton, apo/lauston poiei= to\ tê=s zô|ê=s thnêto/n, ouk a/peiron
protithei=sa chro/non alla\ to\n tê=s athanasi/as aphelome/nê
po/thon~, D.L. x, 123; cf. Metrod. (?), ed. Körte, p. 588, col.
xvi.]
[86\14: ~gego/namen ha/pax, di\s de\ ouk e/sti gene/sthai ktl.~
hence _carpe diem_! _fr._ 204; see also _fr._ 490-4. Metrod. _fr._
53 K.]
[87\14: D.L. x, 81.]
[88\14: Against the fear of torment and punishment in the
underworld: _fr._ 340-1, cf. Lucr. iii, 1011 ff. (torments such as
those fabled of Hades exist in _this_ world: iii, 978 ff.). Cf. the
letter of the Epicurean Diogenes, _Rh. Mus._ 47, 428 ~. . .
phobou=mai ga\r oude\n~ (sc. ~to\n tha/naton) dia\ tou\s Tituou\s
kai\ tou\s Tanta/lous hou\s anagra/phousin en Ha/idou tine/s, oude\
phri/ttô tê\n mu/dêsin (mê/dêsin~ the stone) ~ktl.~]
[89\14: metus ille foras praeceps Acheruntis agendus, funditus
humanam qui vitam turbat ab imo, omnia suffundens mortis nigrore
neque ullam esse voluptatem liquidam puramque reliquit, Lucr. iii,
37 ff.]
[90\14: D.L. x, 126. ridiculum est currere ad mortem taedio vitae,
_fr._ 496.]
[91\14: artifex vitae, Sen. _Ep._ 90, 27.]
[92\14: ~--su\ de\ tê=s au/rion ouk ô\n ku/rios anaba/llê| to\n
kairo/n; ho de\ pa/ntôn bi/os mellêsmô=| parapo/llutai . . .~ _fr._
204.]
[93\14: Negat Epicurus ne diuturnitatem quidem temporis ad beate
vivendum aliquid afferre, nec minorem voluptatem percipi in
brevitate temporis quam si sit illa sempiterna, Cic., _Fin._ ii, 87;
cf. Ep., _Sent._ xix (p. 75 Us.). ~chro/non ou to\n mê/kiston alla\
to\n hê/diston karpi/zetai (ho sopho/s)~: D.L. x, 126.--quae mala
nos subigit vitai tanta cupido, Lucr. iii, 1077. eadem sunt omnia
semper, 945.] {523}
[94\14: ~hê dia/noia . . . to\n pantelê= bi/on pareskeu/asen kai\
oude\n e/ti tou= apei/rou chro/nou prosedeê/thê~, _Sent._ xx (p. 75
Us.).]
[95\14: ~ouk e/sti phusikê\ koinôni/a toi=s logikoi=s pro\s
allê/lous~.--_sibi quemque consulere_, _fr._ 523. Aloofness from
~tai=s tô=n plêthô=n archai=s~ _frr._ 554, 552, 9.]
[96\14: ~hoi no/moi cha/rin tô=n sophô=n kei=ntai, ouch ho/pôs mê\
adikô=sin, all' ho/pôs mê\ adikô=ntai~, _fr._ 530.]
[97\14: ~ouke/ti dei= sô/|zein tou\s He/llênas, oud' epi\ sophi/a|
stepha/nôn par' autoi=s tugcha/nein . . .~ Metrod. _fr._ 41.]
{{524}}
CHAPTER XIV
PART II
POPULAR BELIEF
Philosophic teaching and the philosophic outlook were at this time
by no means confined exclusively to the narrow circles dominated by
particular schools. Never more widely or more effectively than in
this Hellenistic period did philosophy in one shape or another
provide the basis and common medium of a culture that no one of
moderate wealth and leisure would willingly be without. Such ideas
as educated people of the time generally possessed, dealing in a
more connected and definite form with the things of this life and
existence that lie beyond the scope of immediate perception, were
all drawn from the teaching of philosophy. To a certain extent this
is true also of the current views as to the nature and destiny of
the soul. But in the region of the unknowable philosophy can never
entirely replace or suppress the natural--the irrational beliefs--of
mankind. Such beliefs were in their natural element in dealing with
such subjects. They influenced even the philosophically enlightened
and their authority was supreme with the many who in every age are
incapable of understanding the disinterested search for knowledge.
Even in this supreme period of universal philosophic culture,
popular beliefs about the soul still remained in force, unmodified
by the speculations or the exhortations of philosophers.
They had their roots--these beliefs--not in any form of speculative
thought but in the practice of the Cult of Souls: and that Cult, as
it has been described[1\15] for an earlier stage of Greek life,
still went on unaltered and with undiminished vigour. This may be
asserted with confidence, though we can produce no very important
evidence from the literature of this later period. The character and
content of that literature is such that we should hardly expect to
find such evidence in it. But for the most part the literary
evidence from which we were able to illustrate the Cult of Souls in
an earlier period may be taken to apply equally to the age with
which we are now dealing. Even in its final years Lucian's pamphlet
_On Mourning_ bears express witness to the survival of the ancient
and sanctified usages in their fullest compass. We hear again of the
washing, anointing, {525} and crowning of the dead, the ceremonious
lying-in-state upon the bier, the violent and extravagant lament
over the dead body, and all the traditional customs that are still
in full force. Last comes the solemn interment of the body--the
articles of luxury burnt together with the corpse of the dead man or
buried with him in the grave--articles that had once belonged to him
and which he is supposed to enjoy even in death--the feeding of the
helpless soul of the dead with libations of wine and
burnt-offerings--the ritual fasting of the relatives only broken,
after three days, in the Banquet of the Dead.[2\15]
The dead man must not be deprived of a single one of "the customary
things"--only so can his well-being be fully secured.[3\15] The most
important of these is the solemn interment of the body. This is
carried out not only by the family of the dead man, but in many
cases also by the society to which he may have belonged.[4\15] In
these times when the cities sought to make up for the loss of more
serious interests in their life by an often touching care for the
immediate and the insignificant, deserving citizens were frequently
honoured with elaborate funeral processions in which the
municipality took part;[5\15] the city fathers would then probably
decree that representatives should be sent to the survivors and
commissioned to express the sympathy of the city in their loss and
distract their minds from their grief by a speech.[6\15]
The ritual act of burial, the object of so much pious zeal, was the
very reverse of the indifferent matter that philosophy loved to
represent it.[7\15] The sanctity of the place where rests the dead
is also a matter of great importance, not only for the dead man
himself but for the rest of the family which desires to be still
united in the life of the spirit world, and so inhabits a common
burial-ground (generally outside the city, very rarely within,[8\15]
but sometimes, even yet, actually inside the house.[9\15] The
founder of a family-grave desires the members of it to be joined
together in the same grave for at least three generations.[10\15]
Those who have a right to be buried there take steps--religious and
legal or municipal--against the profanation of this family tomb and
sanctuary by the burying in it of strangers or the pillaging of the
vault--a practice that became increasingly common in the final
period of the antique world.[11\15] There are innumerable
grave-notices threatening money penalties in accordance with the
ancient law of the city, to be paid into the public treasury by
those who violate the peace of the grave.[12\15] No less common are
the inscriptions which place the grave and its sanctity {526} under
the protection of the underworld deities, invoking at the same time
the most shocking curses--torments and calamities both temporal and
eternal--against profaners of the holiness of the tomb.[13\15]
Especially the inhabitants of certain districts of Asia Minor, only
very superficially Hellenized, give themselves free rein in the
accumulation of such violent execrations. In their case the dark
superstitions of ancestral and native worship of gods or spirits may
have infected the Hellenes also--it is often the Greeks who become
barbarian rather than the barbarians who are Hellenized in the
history of Greek relations with these stubborn and barbarous native
populations.[14\15] But even in lands where the Greek population has
maintained itself without admixture such execrations are
occasionally to be found in graves.
As time went on and the sanctity and peace of the grave began to be
more and more seriously threatened, measures of all kinds were taken
for its protection. The grave is no mere chamber of corruption; the
souls of the dead dwell there,[15\15] and therefore is it holy; as a
sanctuary it becomes completely sanctified when it has received the
last member of the family, and is enclosed for ever.[16\15] The
family so long as it lasts continues to pay the regular Soul-Cult to
its ancestors;[17\15] sometimes special foundations ensure the
payment for ever[18\15] of the Soul-Cult of which the dead have
need.[19\15] Even those whose burial place lies far away from the
graves of their own family[20\15] are not entirely deprived of
benevolent care and cult.
The pre-supposition of all Cult of Souls--that the dead survive to
enjoy at least a gloomy sepulchral existence in their last
resting-place--is everywhere vividly implied. It speaks to us with
archaic simplicity from those grave-stones upon which the dead, as
though still accessible to the sounds of the human voice and able to
understand the words of the living, are addressed with the customary
words of greeting.[21\15] Sometimes the dead man himself is provided
with a similar greeting which he is supposed to address to the
passers-by[22\15]--between him, confined to his grave, and the
others who still walk about in the daylight a dialogue takes
place.[23\15] The dead man is not entirely cut off from the affairs
of the upper world. He feels an access of fresh life when he is
called by the name that he had once borne in his life-time, and the
memory of which is now preserved only by his gravestone. His
fellow-citizens call upon him three times by name at his
burial;[24\15] but even in the grave {527} he is capable of hearing
the precious sound. On a gravestone at Athens[25\15] the dead man
enjoins upon the members of the actors' guild to which he had
belonged to call upon his name in chorus whenever they pass by his
grave, and to gladden him with the sound of hand-clapping, to which
he had been accustomed in life. At other times the passer-by "kisses
his hand"[26\15] to the dead man; a gesture which denotes the honour
paid to a Hero.[27\15] The soul is not merely alive; it belongs now,
as primitive and age-long belief expressed it, to the Higher and
Mightier Ones.[28\15] Perhaps this exaltation of the wrath and power
of the dead is the meaning of the custom by which the dead are
called the Good, the Honest (~chrêstoi/~). This usage must have
become established at an early period,[29\15] but it is not until
these later days that it is first employed as an addition to the
simple words of greeting addressed to the dead on gravestones. In
this use it is not uniformly current; it is rare in Attica (at
least, on graves of natives of that country); whereas in Boeotia,
Thessaly, and the countries of Asia Minor it is frequent and almost
universal.[30\15] In fact it is natural to suppose[31\15] that this
mode of address, originally a euphemistic title addressed to the
ghosts of the dead who were conceived as quite capable of acting in
a manner the very reverse of that attributed to them by the word,
was intended to suggest the power belonging to the personality so
addressed as one who has risen to a higher form of existence--and to
venerate him with becoming awe.[32\15]
§ 2
The conception of the departed spirit as one who has been raised to
a higher state of dignity and power receives clearer and more
conscious expression where the departed one is called a Hero.
This class of intermediate beings standing on the border line
between mankind and godhead--the world of the Heroes--was in no
danger of extinction at this period of Greek religious belief. The
attitude of mind that could think of certain special souls as
withdrawn from the limitations of visible existence and raised to a
higher spiritual state remained still vigorous and was even able to
give birth to new conceptions.
In its original and proper sense the name _Heros_ never indicated an
independent and self-sufficient spirit. _Archegetes_, "leader" or
"originator", is his real and distinctive title. The _Heros_ stands
at the beginning of a series, taking its origin {528} from him, of
mortal men for whom he is the leader and "ancestor". The genuine
Heroes are the ancestors, whether real or imaginary, of a family or
a house; in the "Heroes", after whom they wish to be called, the
members of a society, a clan, or even a whole race honour the
_archegetai_ of those groups. They are always men of power and
influence, prominent and distinguished from other men, who are
regarded as having thus entered into the life of Heroes after their
death. And even in later times the Heroes of a more recent
elevation, though they may no longer be the leaders of a train of
descendants taking their origin from them, are yet regarded as
distinguished from the people who worship them by their peculiar
virtue and dignity. To become a _Heros_ after death was a privilege
reserved for a few great and uncommon personalities who even in
their lifetime were not as other men were.
The companies of these old and specially chosen Heroes did not
suffer the fate of forgetfulness which would have been their second
and real death. The love of country and city, undying among the
Greeks, attached itself in reverent memory to the illuminated
spirits of the past who had once protected and defended their native
land. When Messene was refounded in the fourth century the Heroes of
the country were solemnly called upon to become inhabitants of the
city as they had been before--more particularly Aristomenes, the
never-forgotten champion of Messenian freedom.[33\15] Even at
Leuctra he had appeared in the melée of the fight, doing battle for
the Thebans.[34\15] Before the battle, Epameinondas had secured the
favour of the Heroines of the place, the daughters of Skedasos, by
means of prayer and sacrifice.[35\15] These were events of the last
heroic age of Greek history, but the cult and memory of the local
Heroes of the Greek countries survived into a much later age.
Leonidas was worshipped by the people of Sparta for many
centuries,[36\15] and the champions of the Persian Wars, the
saviours of Hellas, were worshipped by their remote
descendants.[37\15] Even in imperial times the inhabitants of the
island of Kos still worshipped those who had fallen to secure their
freedom centuries before.[38\15] Such individual cases allow us to
see what was the general rule: the memory and cult of a Hero lived
on as long as the community remained in existence whose duty it was
to maintain his worship. Even those Heroes--a class by
themselves--who have secured their immortality through their fame in
ancient poetry[39\15] still retained their cult undiminished. The
heroic {529} figure of Hektor still preserved life and reality for
his worshippers in the Troad or at Thebes.[40\15] Even in the third
century of our era the district of Troy and the neighbouring coasts
of Europe still kept fresh the memory and the cult of the Heroes of
Epic renown.[41\15] Of Achilles, who had a special fate, we must
speak in another connexion.[42\15]
Nor did less splendid figures vanish from the memory of their
narrower associations of worshippers. Autolykos the founder of
Sinope retained his cult even in the time of Lucullus.[43\15] At a
quite late period the relics of the specially popular Heroes of the
Pan-Hellenic games were still the subject of many
superstitions[44\15] that bear witness to their continued influence.
Heroes to whom healing powers were ascribed continued to do works of
healing and to be worshipped, and their number was even
extended.[45\15] Mere local spirits, whose very names had been
forgotten, nevertheless lost none of the honour that came to them
from their beneficent miracles; such were, for instance, that
Philopregmon of Poteideia who was celebrated by a late poet,[46\15]
or the Hero Euodos of Apollinopolis in Egypt who dispensed "good
journey" to those who honoured him in passing by his
monument.[47\15]
But all Heroes were not yet reduced to such casual salutations from
occasional passers-by. In many places[48\15] the regular festivals
and sacrifices to Heroes still survived--even human sacrifice was
still sometimes made to spirits who were held capable of special
exhibitions of power.[49\15] In a few cases the festivals of Heroes
are the chief feasts in the annual calendar of a city.[50\15] The
names of Heroes quite as much as of Gods were used in
oath-taking[51\15] at treaties made by Greek cities so long as they
retained their independence. Foundations were dedicated to the
honour of Gods and Heroes together.[52\15] Cult associations called
themselves after the Heroes they met to worship.[53\15] Special
priests of certain Heroes were regularly appointed.[54\15] Even in
the second century, in his book of travels, Pausanias is able to
inform us of not a few Heroes whose cult, as he distinctly says, had
gone on unbroken in their cities down to his own day.[55\15] The
annual festival of the Heroes who had fallen at Plataea was still
celebrated with the greatest pomp in the time of Plutarch, who
describes every detail of its archaic ceremonial.[56\15] And at
Sikyon, at the same time, the Heroic festival of Aratos, the founder
of the Achæan League, was still celebrated, though here the
centuries had robbed the occasion of many of its former
glories.[57\15] {530}
In all such ceremonies it was to a single and definite
spirit-personality that the devotion of men was offered. Each of
them received the cult that was due to him by the terms of some
old-established and sanctified foundation. Nothing was further from
men's minds than the loose and vague conception, expressed sometimes
by ancient writers, that _all_ brave men of the past or all
outstanding individuals of whatever time are to be regarded
forthwith as Heroes.[58\15] It was still clearly and consciously
felt that elevation to the rank of Hero was not a privilege that
belonged as a matter of course to any particular class of mankind,
but, wherever it occurred, was essentially a ratification of quite
exceptional worth and influence displayed already in the lifetime of
the Hero. Following this conception even the Hellenistic age added
to the number of the Heroes by drawing upon the great men of the
present. A little earlier Pelopidas and Timoleon had been honoured
in this way, and now the figures of Leosthenes, Kleomenes, and
Philopoimen were raised to heroic glory.[59\15] Even Aratos, the
very incarnation of the sobriety of a too matter-of-fact age, at the
end of a life devoted with ardour but without enduring success to
the service of his country, was supposed by his countrymen to have
passed over in a mysterious manner into the realm of heroic
semi-divinity.[60\15]
As in these cases whole populations honoured individuals so also did
narrower and much humbler associations, even in this rationalist
age, elevate their helpers and protectors to the rank of Hero and
honour them as such. The slaves of Kos thus honoured their former
comrade and leader Drimakos;[61\15] at another place there was a
Hero who protected all refugees who took shelter with him;[62\15] at
Ephesos there was a Hero who had been a simple shepherd.[63\15] At
the time of Augustus, a benefactor of his city, Athenodoros, the
philosopher, had been made a Hero by grateful Tarsians after his
death.[64\15] It sometimes happens that a Hero of the distant past
may find himself confused with a descendant of the same name whom
his contemporaries put in the place of his own ancestor and worship
in his stead.[65\15]
So little were men grown out of the ideas centred round the cult of
Heroes that, accustomed to the ever-increasing adoration of the
"Mightier and Better", every age was eager to add to their number
from the men of the present. They did not always wait for the death
of the individual so honoured before beginning to address him as
_Heros_; even in his lifetime he must enjoy a foretaste of the
honour that was destined {531} to be his after his departure from
this life. Thus, Lysander was saluted as a Hero after his victory by
the Greeks whom he had liberated from the despotism of Athens; and
in the Hellenistic age many a fortunate army commander or mighty
king received the same honour. Of the Romans Flamininus the friend
of the Greeks was the first to receive it.[66\15] This
misapplication of the cult of Heroes to the living then became still
further extended.[67\15] It may be that sometimes it was a real
feeling of unusual merit that fired the impulsive temperament of the
Greeks; but in the end the custom became almost a meaningless
convention; even private individuals were thus called Hero in their
lifetime[68\15] and heroic honours--even the foundation of annual
athletic games--were granted to living persons almost
indiscriminately.[69\15] And at last when it was necessary to honour
an individual whom the love and passionate regret of a monarch
elevated to the rank of Hero after his death then, indeed, the age
could hardly do enough in the hyperbole of pomp and ceremony. The
funeral honours paid to the dead Hephaistion are an extravagant
example of this.[70\15]
If in such cases the limits between the worship of a Hero and the
adoration of a god seemed almost to have disappeared, we still have
evidence of individual cases in which the survivors, without
actually naming them Heroes, offer to their much-loved dead a
memorial cult that hardly falls short of full heroic honours.[71\15]
Nor is it only in such cases as these that we perceive the signs of
a tendency to exalt the Cult of Souls everywhere and to approximate
it to the worship of ancestors in the ancient Cult of Heroes. It
emerges clearly enough, for all the brevity of their language, from
the multitude of epitaphic inscriptions in which members of simple
citizen families are addressed with the title of _Heros_. At any
rate, it betokens an increase in the importance and dignity of the
dead when a tombstone expressly announces that an individual citizen
has been "heroized" by the city after his death. And this is what
not infrequently happened--early in Thera and later on in many other
places as well.[72\15] The same conclusion must be drawn when we
hear of associations declaring a dead member to be a _Heros_;[73\15]
or when a society recognizes a dead man as _Heros_ on the formal
motion of an individual.[74\15] Families, too, become accustomed to
giving the name to those of their number that have died before the
rest; and a son will thus speak of his father, parents of a son, and
a wife of her husband--either informally or by a formal declaration
naming {532} the dead one as _Heros_.[75\15] A higher and mightier
form of existence after death must be imagined for the departed when
he is thus distinguished so explicitly from the ordinary multitude
of the dead--still more so in those cases when the dead man,
elevated to a mystic communion with higher forms of life, loses his
own name and receives in exchange that of a Hero of long-standing
honour, or even that of a God.[76\15]
In every case that is known to us, the "heroizing" of a dead person
by the city or a society or the family is carried out entirely on
the independent authority of those bodies. The Delphic Oracle,
without whose deciding voice it was hardly possible in early times
for the company of the elect to receive any addition,[77\15] was, in
these days when the prestige of the oracle had sunk almost to
nothing, no longer applied to for its sanction. The consequence was
hardly avoidable that the licence thus accorded to corporations and
families should widen still further the bounds of the Heroes'
kingdom. In the end, these boundaries broke down entirely. There
were cities and countries where it became the custom to apply the
title of "Hero" as an epithet of honour belonging to all the dead
without distinction. It seems that this extension of "heroizing" to
all the dead first became common in Boeotia,[78\15] though here it
was not quite universal--Thespiai was an exception.[79\15]
Thessalian grave-inscriptions give the fullest evidence for the
heroizing of the dead of every age and description. But the custom
spread to every country populated by Greeks;[80\15] only Athens is
less unrestrained[81\15] in the bestowal of the title of Hero upon
the dead--a title which retained no more of the old and essential
meaning of the word (which perhaps survived longest in Athens) than
to say that the dead were really now dead.[82\15]
In spite of such indiscriminate application the name "Hero" still
continued to be something of a title of honour. An honour, indeed,
that was thus accorded to everyone without distinction was in danger
of becoming the reverse of an honour. But isolated phrases of a
naive and popular character make it clear that a difference was
still felt to exist between the "Hero" and those who were not
honoured with this distinguishing epithet.[83\15] When the name of
Hero was thus applied to all the dead, not in exceptional cases but
as a rule, the glory and distinction of which the idea of the "Hero"
was thus deprived must have fallen in some measure upon the
individual dead, if they {533} and the Heroes could meet on common
ground. Thus, even the dissipation of the heroic honour and its
indiscriminate application to all the dead is in reality but another
indication of the fact that even in the decline of the ancient world
the power and dignity of the departed soul had not declined too, but
had, on the contrary, grown greater.
§ 3
The souls of the departed show their power and the fact that they
are still alive more particularly in the effect that they have on
this life and on the living. For the purposes of the Cult of Souls
they are regarded as confined to the region of the inhabited earth;
they continue in the grave or near it, for a time or permanently,
and can therefore be reached by the offerings or the prayers of
their living relatives. There can be no doubt that at this time men
still believed, as they had done since the earliest times, in a
kindly relationship between the family and its departed members, an
exchange in which offerings were made at the grave by the living and
blessings vouchsafed by the Unseen. It is true, however, that we
only have imperfect records of such calm and comfortable family
belief in the survival of the departed and of the part they continue
to play in the daily life of their descendants.
But there is a more sinister variety of intercourse with the souls
or spirits of the dead. They sometimes appear unsought to the
living; they can be compelled by the force of magic to use their
powers in the service of the living. Both these possibilities apply
more particularly to those unquiet souls whom fate or their own
hands have deprived of life violently and before their time; to
those who have not been consigned to the peace of the grave by
ceremonious burial.[84\15] The enlightened of the time do indeed
refuse to believe in ghosts and haunting spirits of the dead that
wander without rest about the place of their tragic fate, and make
their presence disagreeably felt by the living.[85\15] But the
populace, even in such enlightened days, gave the fullest credence
to stories in which the existence of a spirit-world seemed to reveal
its sinister reality, trespassing at times upon the world of the
living. Regular folk-tales of spectral apparitions, vagrant ghosts
of unfortunate souls, vampire-like spirits of the grave,[86\15] are
preserved to us in some numbers--chiefly such as appealed to a
perverted philosophy, the _insaniens sapientia_ of an outworn age,
as seeming to confirm its fancies of an invisible world between
heaven and earth. In Lucian's _Lover of Lies_ the grey-beard {534}
philosophers entertain each other in portentous seriousness with
such communications from the spirit world.[87\15] Plutarch himself
is quite seriously convinced of the reality of some ghostly
appearances.[88\15] Philosophy, which at this time was going back to
Plato, found in its system of demonology a means of making such old
wives' tales intelligible and credible to itself.
Finally, the time arrives when the violent and arbitrary
interference with the unseen world--sorcery and
spirit-raising--becomes a part of orthodox philosophy. The popular
imagination of the Greeks did not have to wait for instruction from
their barbarian neighbours, who had reduced the irrational to a
system, before they could believe in the summoning of spirits from
the deep. Magic in this sense was of extreme antiquity in
Greece.[89\15] But in the fusion and intermixture of Greeks with
barbarians which marked the Hellenistic age similar and cognate
superstitions from all the corners of the earth met together and
acquired strength from their union. It was foreign sources rather
than Greek which chiefly contributed to swell the turbid and noxious
stream of sorceries and spirit-raisings, the practical application
of an irrational theory of the nature and being of the soul in
separation from the body. The lofty heaven of the old Greek gods was
beginning to grow dim before the troubled vision of this later age;
more and more their place was taken by a mob of idols and an obscure
rabble of lesser devils. In this chaotic medley of Greek and
barbarian demonology the companies of unquiet souls and ghosts of
the dead easily found a place. The ghost was no longer an alien when
the Gods themselves had become ghostly. When both Gods and spirits
have to answer to the spells of the sorcerer the souls of the dead
are seldom left in peace.[90\15] We possess some relics of the art
of spirit-raising in the Græco-Egyptian magic books; and we can now
see with our eyes specimens which illustrate the practical outcome
of this delusion in the magic charms and exorcisms that were
scratched on tablets of lead or gold and placed in the graves--as
the natural abode of the spirits which were to be compelled--where
they have been found in considerable quantities in modern times.
Among the sinister influences that are thus conjured to do the work
of vengeance, punishment, or destruction upon the conjurer's enemy,
the unquiet souls of the dead are also regularly mentioned. To them
is attributed the power and the will to intervene with malevolence
and obstruction in the life of men, no less than to the other
spiritual {535} powers of heaven and hell in company with whom they
are summoned.[91\15]
§ 4
The Cult of Souls for all its expansion gave no assistance to the
picturing of what might be the condition of the departed souls
independently of their connexion with the living. Those who troubled
themselves about such matters and sought further information were
obliged to have recourse, if not to the systems of theologians and
philosophers, then to the imaginative accounts and pictures of
ancient poetry and legend.
The idea of a distant realm of the souls into which the strengthless
shadows of those who had departed this life disappeared had not lost
its hold on the popular imagination even of these later
ages--difficult as it might be to reconcile[92\15] such an idea with
the pre-suppositions of cultus with its customary worship and
sustenance of the souls confined within the grave. The belief in a
distant kingdom of the dead could not but continue to be current
among men for whom the Homeric poems remained the earliest manual
and school-book in the hands of youth and the source of instruction
and entertainment to every age. The passionate indignation with
which philosophers of the Stoic as well as the Epicurean faith
attacked the beliefs resting on the teaching of Homer cannot be
explained except by supposing that Homer and his picture had
remained a guiding force with the masses who were uninstructed in
philosophy. And, in fact, ancient writers use language which shows
that the ancient conception of Hades was by no means discarded but
on the contrary was still vigorously alive among the
populace.[93\15]
As to what might go on down below and the general appearance of the
underworld--these were questions that the invention of theological
and semi-philosophic fancy, each according to its special lights and
preconceptions, strove to answer in eager competition.[94\15] But
such attempts to picture the condition of things in the kingdom of
the souls--attempts which reached their highest point in the
elaborate chiaroscuro of Vergil's Hades--remained the exercises of
ingenious fancy and rarely pretended to be anything else. A distinct
and authoritative popular system of belief on these points was
scarcely possible when the orthodox religion of the state formally
and dogmatically rejected everything of the kind.