In the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus, Socrates deploys a variety of arguments to soothe Axiochus’ fear of death. One of these is the ‘symmetry argument’ that tries to demonstrate that the state we will be in post mortem is no more harmful than the state we were in before birth. This argument is often associated with Epicureanism and with their commitment to the mortality of the soul, and it is therefore sometimes thought that Socrates’ use of it here is inconsistent with his commitment in the dialogue to the claim that each of us is in fact an immortal soul. This is also sometimes thought to show that the dialogue as a whole is clumsily constructed. I show how Socrates may deploy a symmetry argument and remain consistent with his other commitments.

At first glance, Plotinus’ arguments for the immortality of the human soul, principally in Ennead IV 7 (2), constitute a straightforward defense of Plato against Peripatetic and Stoic attacks. And yet, his close reading of his predecessors, especially Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, led him to confront the following deep problem. The best arguments for immortality rest upon the immateriality of intellect and hence its immunity from destruction along with the body. But, following Aristotle, Plotinus maintains that the nature of intellection is such that the contents of the objects of intellection both identify the agent of intellection and further will be identical for every disembodied intellect. For this reason, it is not clear what it would mean to insist on the personal immortality of anyone. Without personal immortality, though, the ethical dimension of Platonism is, for Plotinus, severely undermined. In the light of this difficulty Plotinus developed an apparently original doctrine that was repudiated by virtually all his successors. He argued that there are Forms of individuals, that is, of individual intellects, and that, since they are eternal Forms, they are ‘undescended’. He argued that the personal identity of any human soul is found paradigmatically in an undescended intellect.

Whereas the previous chapters dealt with the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law in terms of method, this chapter deals with the influence with regard to a substantive issue, the notion of person. The Roman jurists became interested in the abstract use of the notion of person in the slipstream of the philosophers, who combined the Greek understanding of person with a more indigenous, that is Etruscan, understanding thereof. ‘Person’ thus understood would become one of the central notions in Roman law and beyond.

It is a commonplace among scholars that the early Pythagoreans posited an immortal soul. The earliest source to associate immortality of the soul to the Pythagoreans unequivocally, Dicaearchus of Messana, stipulates that they held that (a) the soul is immortal; (b) it changes into other kinds of animals; (c) there is eternal recurrence; and (d) embodied animate creatures are of the same genus. A problem with Dicaearchus' account is that each of these doctrines can also be found in the dialogues of Plato. Given Dicaearchus' penchant for conflating Platonic with Pythagorean philosophy, we cannot employ this account for a historical understanding of Pythagorean psychology in a straightforward way. This chapter instead investigates Pythagorean psychology through analysis of two passages of Aristotle’s De anima that are often not brought to bear on the question. One passage draws important comparisons between the psychology of the Pythagoreans and Democritean and Ecphantic atomism, suggesting that the early Pythagoreans held a material theory of soul; by reference to arguments similar to Cebes' in Plato's Phaedo (87b-e), the other explains how a transmigratory soul could nevertheless be mortal. The early Pythagoreans are thus likely to have held that the soul is material, mortal, and transmigratory.

In this chapter the topic of the interaction between Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy in the late Republican era is introduced, with reference to earlier treatments in modern scholarship. Furthermore, preliminary issues are brought up, such as the problem of the sources, the characterisations of law and philosophy as practices – law as a practice of dispute resolution and philosophy as practiced within schools or haereseis with different outlooks -, and the role of rhetoric in the interaction.

In this chapter the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law is continued in terms of method: from Hellenistic epistemology the Roman jurists, like the grammarians, took over the notion of rule: they started to use it initially as a mnemotechnical device in order to get to grips with their growing legal output.

This chapter is about the achievement of immortality in contexts where an everlasting future for the subject is not envisaged. I start with Aristotle’s advice in the Nicomachean Ethics to ‘act as an immortal’ and argue that the talk of immortality does not derive from Aristotle’s own theories about the soul and intellect but rather should be understood with reference to the immediate dialectical context. I then relate Epicurean and Stoic discussions of immortality and ‘imperishability’ to the relevant parts of their theology. The early Epicurean tradition mentions ‘immortal goods’ that can be attained by human beings and are enough to make human beings, in the relevant ethical respect, godlike. Epicureanism contains more than one conception of these ‘goods’, although they should never be identified with either immortality or imperishability. In Stoicism the attribution of mortality and immortality is controlled by strict adherence to a Platonic definition of death (the separation of soul from body) – stricter adherence than we find in the Phaedo itself.