Meditations IV.21
If souls outlive their bodies, how does the air contain them35 from times everlasting? How does the earth contain the bodies of those who have been buried in it for such endless ages? For just as on earth the change of these bodies, after continuance for a certain indefinite time, followed by dissolution, makes room for other dead bodies, so souls, when transferred into the air, after lasting for a certain time,36 suffer change and are diffused and become fire, being taken again into the Seminal Reason of the Whole, and so allow room for those that subsequently take up their abode there. This would be the answer one would give on the assumption that souls outlive their bodies.
But not only must the multitude of bodies thus constantly being buried be taken into account, but also that of the creatures devoured daily by ourselves and the other animals. How great is the number consumed and thus in a way buried37 in the bodies of those who feed upon them! And yet room is made for them all by their conversion into blood, by their transmutation into air or fire.
Where in this case lies the way of search for the truth? In a separation of the Material from the Causal.38
- 35.Compare Tzetzes’ Chiliades vii. 806.
John Tzetzes was a 12th-century Byzantine scholar; the Chiliades (“Thousands”) is his long verse compendium of stories and learned lore.
- 36.iii. 3; vi. 24; vii. 32, 50; viii. 25, 58; xii. 5. The Stoic doctrine on this point was not very definite, but it was mostly held that souls might exist till the next cyclical conflagration, when they became merged into the λόγος σπερματικός. Marcus wavers in his belief.
The cyclical conflagration is the Stoic ekpyrōsis, in which the universe is periodically consumed by fire and renewed; logos spermatikos, “seminal reason,” is the rational principle containing the seeds of all things.
- 37.Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, i. 6; Athenagoras’s Apology 36. Apuleius (Metamorphoses iv, near the beginning) calls beasts the living tombs of condemned criminals. Longinus (On the Sublime iii) inveighs against the trope, as used by Gorgias of Leontini.
Athenagoras’s Apology is his Plea for the Christians. Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, is a Latin comic novel of the 2nd century. On the Sublime is a Greek treatise on literary style of probably the 1st century AD, transmitted under the name of Longinus; it cites as an example of strained style Gorgias of Leontini, the 5th-century BC Sicilian rhetorician, calling vultures “living tombs.”
- 38.See vii. 29.