Quote:Opposing Panaetius, who denied the survival of the soul, Posidonius claimed that it survived the death of the body, and would continue as an organized mass of fire in the atmosphere, surrounded by other daimones like itself. He rejected the notion of a Hades, or any place of punishment beneath the Earth, for the Earth was solid. Nor did he allow that guilty souls might be punished while dwelling in the air, a view reflected in Aeneid VI. All suffering arises, in fact, from the soul’s union with the body. Rather, the soul rises until it reaches a level where the atmosphere is like itself, so that a pure soul unacquainted with irrational passions would fly immediately to the sphere of the fixed stars, while souls weighted down with their prior contact with the body would rise only to a certain level, and remain there until their substance was cleansed and they could rise higher. Many souls are so heavy and dense that they hover very near the surface of the Earth, and are eventually united to bodies once more. Thus the Earth becomes the place of punishment, from which the wise soul escapes. The soul in the heavens take their joy in observing the movements of the stars, and sometimes provide advice to those souls that are experiencing the greatest difficulty in attaining to the heavens.
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