intro
The discussion of the second part of the myth, the demonology and eschatology, has also been concerned mainly with the problem of Plutarch’s sources. Heinze attempted to prove that this myth had been put together out of material drawn from Xenocrates and from Posidonius and that in the resulting combination the parts that belong to those two authors are distinguishable.Richard Heinze, Xenokrates (Leipzig, 1892), pp. 123 ff. M. Pohlenz, Vom Zorne Gottes (Göttingen, 1909), p. 133, n. 1, approved Heinze’s conclusion in general but differed with him in some particulars. Adler vigorously attacked this thesis and argued that Posidonius was Plutarch’s source for the whole myth and for whatever there is in it that may have come ultimately from XenocratesMaximilian Adler, Op. cit. (note b, p. 18), pp. 166 ff. Adler’s dissertation was reviewed by Pohlenz in B.P.W. xxxii (1912), 648-654, and his thesis concerning the source of the myth criticized, ibid. 653. P. Capelle ( luna stellis lacteo orbe animarum sedibus [Halle, 1917], pp. 14-15) held that chapter 28 came from Posidonius’s account of the state of souls after death and chapters 29 and 30 from his supposed commentary on the Timaeus.; but R. M. Jones The Platonism of Plutarch (Chicago Dissertation, Menasha, Wisconsin, 1916), pp. 48-56 and 58-60. proved conclusively that neither Heinze’s conclusions nor Adler’s will bear scrutiny, that Posidonius could not have been the source, and that, while Plutarch combined various eschatological notions which were current and some of which were probably held in common by different philosophers, his myth is in the main an interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. Later, against Karl Reinhardt’s attempt to trace the myth back to a hypothetical solar esehatology of Posidonius, Jones re-established the Platonic character of Plutarch’s eschatology, psychology, and demonology here and the impossibility of taking Posidonius for the source.K. Reinhardt, Kosmos und Sympathie (Munich, 1926), pp. 313 ff. (cf. also F. Cumont, La ThÈologie solaire du paganisme romain, Mèm. de lAcad. des Inscriptions, xii [1909]); R. M. Jones, Posidonius and Solar Eschatology, Class. Phil. xxvii (1932), pp. 113-135, especially pp. 116-131. P. BoyancÈ, Ètudes sur le Songe de Scipion (Bordeaux and Paris, 1936), pp. 78-104, follows Jones in refuting Cumont and Reinhardt. Hamilton later contended even more positively that Plutarch took the Timaeus as the model for the whole of his myth in the Facie and that, since the Animae Procreatione in Timaeo shows that he regarded the Timaeus seriously, he must have intended the corresponding portion of his myth in the Facie to contain an equally serious exposition of his own beliefs concerning the nature and fate of the soul.W. Hamilton, Class. Quart. xxviii (1934), pp. 24-30. Hamilton expressly opposes the theory of von Arnim, who, in his Plutarch über Dämonen und Mystik (see note a, p. 22), pp. 24-65, argues that Plutarch took the geographical myth and the eschatological myth from two different sources and the latter from an eclectic Platonist later than Antiochus. As to Hamilton’s notion of the seriousness with which Plutarch intended the myth, Ziegler is surely right in saying (Plutarchos von Chaironeia, 217) that Sulla’s final sentence, taken together with Lamprias’s remark in 920 B - C, shows that Plutarch had no intention of insisting upon the literal truth of the myth; in this attitude also he follows Plato: see note a on p. 223 s.v.. Soury in his extensive study of the myth, while emphasizing the possible influence of the mysteries, agrees in general with Hamilton that it is preponderantly Platonic.G. Soury, Rev. Èt. Gr. liii (1940), pp. 51-58, and La Dèmonologie de Plutarque (Paris, 1942), pp. 73-82 and 177-210.
