Not necessarily. The relevant sentence or part of that sentence in Tacitus
15.44 might not be original, so reference to Pilate might not have existed in Justin's time ("who was crucified under Pontius Pilate" in
6 might also be an interpolation; as might be Pilate's name in the incipit of Marcion's Evangelion-gospeltext).
This raises the prospect of the changing characterisation of daimones and the development of demons which, while such changing characterisation had been happening since Plato, likely increased and even changed course from around Justin's time.
When Christian theologians were at their most defensive
* in the face of Hellenic culture (between the second and fifth centuries CE), they did their best to depict daimones as what modern people call “demons.” But this adaptation of earlier discourses (quite intentionally) distorted and simplified Greek conceptions.
... * [ I would say they were often on the offensive ie. seeking to co-opt and rewrite Hellenic and other cultures ]
To explain daimones, ancient Jews and Christians devised sinister origin stories that borrowed elements from Ancient Near eastern and Greek lore. Daimones were said to be the ghosts of ancient giants. These giants were originally the offspring of angels who mated with mortal women (thus forging a genetic connection between angels and daimones). Later, daimones were directly envisioned as fallen angels led by an originally angelic lord, Lucifer. In time, daimones began to be depicted in the guise of Greek satyrs: shaggy-legged rogues with little horns and pointy beards. These daimones wielded pitchforks to prod naked sinners into the fiery chasms of hell. Needless to say, Greek daimones originally had little to do with these fiends. Thus it will be helpful to bracket everything one has learned about later Christian demonology and start afresh.
The Nature of Daimones
For Plato, daimones were beings of middling status – higher than humanity but not fully fledged gods. They are spiritual ferry-men, shuttling up the prayers of humans and conveying gifts from above. Daimones controlled the apparatus of state and personal religion, which in Plato’s day dealt with prophecies, sacrifices, initiations, and spells.
The pseudo-Platonic Epinomis (late fourth century BCE) distinguished at least two classes of daimones, both translucent. The first is made of air, the other of ether (the fiery, refined air of the upper atmosphere). The author described them as wondrously intelligent, heaven-dwellers, and quick learners who, fully understand the human disposition, wondrously welcoming those of us who are noble and good, but despising evil people as already affected by grief ... When the heaven became full of living beings, daimones began to serve as go-betweens amongst themselves and the highest gods on behalf of all people and with regard to all things, since these middling beings fly to earth and soar through the whole heaven with a nimble whoosh.
The hybrid quality of daimones was aptly expressed by Apuleius, an African Platonist (about 125–170
CE):
Daimones are types of living beings, rational by nature, emotive in disposition, aerial in body, eternal in time. Of these five qualities, the first three they share with humans, the fourth is peculiar to them, the last they share with the immortal gods, though they differ from these with respect to their emotive nature.
Daimones, Apuleius said elsewhere, were capable, like humans,
“of suffering by anger, being inclined to pity, allured by gifts, appeased by prayers, exasperated by offenses, soothed by honors, and changed by all other things in the same way that we are.”
... the philosopher Thales (about 625–546 BCE)
[had been
] the first to establish a classification of gods, daimones, and heroes. He called heroes good or evil souls separated from the body; daimones, in turn, he named “soul substances.”
The Roman writer Varro (116–27 BCE) identified both heroes and daimones (here called
genii) with aerial souls (
aerias animas).
Daimones and Heroes
The Greek polymath Plutarch (about 50–120 CE) proposed that virtuous humans first become heroes then daimones, suggesting both difference and evolutionary continuity.
During Late Antiquity (roughly 150–640 CE), there were disputes about whether daimones were formerly human or of a fixed nature. Usually the answer was both/and. There were, for instance, everlasting daimones who were never human, as well as human souls who became daimones in the course of their evolution.
Diogenes Laertius (early third century
CE) reported that for the Stoics, daimones are overseers of human affairs, and heroes are the disembodied souls of virtuous people.
... daimonification in antiquity often blended with heroization
... both heroes and daimones were morally ambiguous – providing benefits and punishments at different times and for different reasons.
Generally speaking, early Christian theologians simplified the spirit-world by saying that all daimones were bad. Although this simplification perdures, it never fully conquered the ancient (or modern) imagination. Indeed, it flew in the face of Platonic daimonology, which generally asserted that daimones, as part of the divine sphere, were good. Stories of malicious, punishing angels are, moreover, not hard to discover.
Daimones and Angels
Up until about the fourth century CE, Hellenic and Hellenized peoples regularly equated angels and daimones ...
About 175 CE, Celsus, a Platonist philosopher, equated “angels or other daimones”. Hermetic literature (first to third century CE) did not ontologically distinguish these two types of being. In the third century CE, the Roman writer Cornelius Labeo said that the beings he called daimones are identical with what other people named angels. The Christian writer Arnobius (about 255–330 CE) classified gods, daimones, and angels as intermediate natures below the supreme deity.
About the same time, the Platonist Porphyry spoke of “divine angels” and “good daimones” who oversee human deeds. By Porphyry’s time, angels were typically higher than daimones in the chain of being. Porphyry himself assigned them different regions: the lower air being the locus of daimones, the upper fiery air that of angels. But whether lower or higher on the chain of being, angels and daimones continued to exhibit a similar nature. They were beings of midgrade status, hybrid species with subtle bodies, super powers, and powerful emotions – much like superheroes today.
In this book, I do not treat all kinds of angels and daimones. I focus solely on how educated members of the elite imagined the transformation of humans into daimones and angels
... How angels and daimones relate to (the origin of) evil has already been studied at length.
66
66 For evil daimones, see
. - G. J. Riley, “Demon,” in
DDD 235–40; Lange, Lichtenberger and Römheld, eds.,
Die Dämonen;
. - Richard Valantasis,
Making of the Self (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008), 150-62;
. - David Brakke,
Demons and the Making of the Monk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009);
. - Chris Keith and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds.,
Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016);
. - Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum,
Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 116–40;
. - Jörg Frey and Enno Edzard Popkes,
Dualismus, Dämonologie und diabolische Figuren (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018)
