 At first sight, this assertion might appear to conflict with Alcmaeon’s belief that the soul is immortal. It seems likely, however, that Alcmaeon distinguished between human beings as individual bodies, which do perish, and as souls, which do not (Barnes 1982, 115). There is no evidence about what Alcmaeon thought happened to the soul, when the body perished, however. Did he believe in reincarnation as the Pythagoreans did? No ancient source associates Alcmaeon with reincarnation and his sharp distinction between animals and human beings may suggest that he did not believe in it (Guthrie 1962: 354). He might have thought that the soul joined other divine beings in the heavens. The point of Fragment 2 may be that, whereas the heavenly bodies do join their beginnings to their ends in circular motion, humans are not able to join their end in old age to their beginning in childhood, i.e. human life does not have a cyclical structure. We might even suppose that the soul tries to impose such a structure on the body from its own circular motion but ultimately fails (Guthrie 1962, 353). It has been rather speculatively suggested that, since Alcmaeon explains sleep and waking by the blood retreating into the inner vessels and then expanding again into the outer vessels (see 3.2 below), it may be that this “circular motion” of the blood that fails in death (Kouloumentas 2018b).