Note 59 — Chapter XIV · THE LATER AGE OF THE GREEK WORLD PART I PHILOSOPHY

Panaitios denied not merely the immortality but even the διαμονή of the soul after death: Cic., TD. i, 78–9. Two reasons are there given: everything that has come into being (like the soul of man at birth) must also perish—the Aristotelian principle: see above, n. 25; what can feel pain (as the soul does) must become diseased and what is diseased must eventually perish. (Here the destruction of the soul from its own inward decay is asserted—not from the effect of external force at the world conflagration, the periodic occurrence of which Pan. at least called in question.) Acc. to Schmekel (mittl. Stoa, p. 309) it follows from Cic., TD. i, 42, that Panaitios also added a third argument: that the soul being composite must suffer the dissolution of its parts in death which change into other elements. This does not indeed at all follow from the passage, but such a view would almost have been inevitable with Panaitios’ doctrine of the soul and had already been suggested by Karneades in his polemic against the indestructibility of the divine and of every ζῷον—an argument to which Pan. on the whole yielded.