Note 60 — Chapter XIV · THE LATER AGE OF THE GREEK WORLD PART I PHILOSOPHY

Poseidonios distinguished in the human soul not three parts but three δυνάμεις μιᾶς οὐσίας ἐκ τῆς καρδίας ὁρμωμένης (Gal. v, 515), namely, the Platonic three, the λογιστικόν, θυμοειδές, ἐπιθυμητικόν (Gal. v, 476). The last two are the δυνάμεις ἄλογοι (they only give φαντασίαι the special forms taken by their impulses: Gal. v, 474, 399). The πάθη are not judgments nor the consequences of judgment but the motions (κινήσεις) of these δυνάμεις ἄλογοι (Gal. v, 429; cf. 378). In this way alone is it possible to understand how passion or wrong-doing can arise in man; it is because soul is not (as Chrysipp. had taught) pure reasoning power (cf. also Gal. iv, 820). There exists then in man an ἄλογον καὶ κακόδαιμον καὶ ἄθεον in addition to the δαίμων συγγενὴς τῷ τὸν ὅλον κόσμον διοικοῦντι: Gal. v, 469 f. How, indeed, this is possible when the soul is a single οὐσία and in its nature nothing but divine πνεῦμα it is difficult to say.—Pos. too was quite ignorant of an evil principle in the world, not the divine or contrary to the divine principle. The ethical teaching of Stoicism had always contained a dualism which is here transferred to the physical doctrine where it was originally unknown. From the time of Pos. there is an ever growing tendency to emphasize the contrast (which was, however, always familiar to the older Stoics as well) between “soul” and “body”, the inutilis caro ac fluida, Pos. ap. Sen., Ep. 92, 10. In view of this contrast the “soul” too is no longer said to come into being with the body or with the physical conception of the individual (cf. γεγονέναι τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ μεταγενεστέραν εἶναι [τοῦ σώματος], Chrysipp. ap. Plu., Sto. Rep. 1053 D [ii, 222 Arn.]), but rather to have been living before that, in the separate life of the divine. It is nowhere expressly or authoritatively stated that Poseidonios held the “pre-existence” of the “soul”; but that view has been rightly attributed to him, fitting in as it does with his other ideas, and because it is often introduced and taken for granted in those passages where Cicero or Seneca are following Pos. (see Corssen, de Pos. Rhod., p. 25 ff. But we may not read the doctrine of pre-existence into S.E., M. ix, 71, as Heinze, Xenok. 134, 2, does). If the soul-δαίμων was in existence before its incarnation it can presumably only enter the body with the conception of the individual life θύραθεν, tractus extrinsecus as Cic. puts it, Div. ii, 119; a passage obviously related (as Bonhöffer, Epikt. 79 remarks) to the statement in Div. i, 64, where he is speaking of the immortales animi of which the air is full—and there Pos. is mentioned by name as the authority. From its pre-existent life in the air the “soul” enters into man. The multitude of individual bodiless souls—not only the one impersonal soul-substance of the world—were thus living before their ἐνσωμάτωσις, and the Stoic pantheism thus turns into a rather questionable “pandaemonism”. On the other hand, Poseidonios in opposition to his teacher, Panaitios, adheres to the doctrine of the periodic extinction of all life in the one Soul of the World, the original Fire: cf. Dox. 388a, 18; b, 19. Holding this view he cannot very well have put the origin of each of the individual soul-daimones before the beginning of the particular world-period in which they live. Nor can the survival of the souls after their separation from the body be prolonged beyond the next ἐκπύρωσις (which makes Cicero’s immortales animi inexact: Div. i, 64, after Pos.). Thus, although the survival which Panaitios had denied is reaffirmed it does not go beyond the qualified doctrine of immortality which the older Stoics had held. At the same time Pos. could hold, with Chrysipp. and other Stoics, that there was a περιοδικὴ παλιγγενεσία (M. Ant. xi, 1) after the world-conflagration and even that each individual man of the previous world-period would be restored again in precisely the same place (Chrysipp. ap. Lact., Inst. 7, 23, 3, etc.; ii, 189 Arn.; cf. the Orphico-Pythagorean fantasy: above, chap. x, n. 47). But this would not amount to an ἀθανασία for the individual: the individual life has been interrupted and is separated from its ἀποκατάστασις by a long interval of time.—There is no satisfactory reason for assigning to Pos. the belief in a series of μετενσωματώσεις of the soul—as Heinze does, Xen. 132 ff.—though such an idea would not have been hard to arrive at, even while holding fast to the doctrine of the final ἐκπύρωσις. But the dubious accounts given by many δοξογράφοι of Stoic teaching on the question of the μεταγγισμὸς ψυχῶν need not necessarily refer to Poseidonios: nor are we bound to draw this conclusion because they reappear in Plutarch. Plu. does indeed here and there follow Poseidonios, but he never hesitates to add Platonic ideas or fancies of his own invention, a fact which makes it most risky to attempt to fix an exact source for any particular detail in his variegated mosaic.