It is always with difficulty that men resign themselves to dying wholly. Even when reason admits, nay when it desires, annihilation, the subconscious self protests against it; our personality is impelled by its very essence to crave the persistence of its self. Besides, the feelings of survivors rebel against the pain of an unending separation, the definite loss of all affections. In the troubled times which marked the end of the Roman Republic, at a moment when changing fortune periodically turned all the conditions of existence upside down, there grew up a stronger aspiration to a better future, a search, to use the words of the ancients, for a sure haven, in which man, tossed by the storms of life, might find quiet. Thus in the first century B. C. the birth was seen, or rather the rebirth, of a mystic movement which claimed to give by direct communication with God the certainties which reason could not supply. The chief preoccupation of philosophers began to be those capital questions as to the origin and end of man which the schools of the earlier period had neglected as unanswerable. It was above all the Neo-Pythagoreans who gave up pure rationalism, and thus brought Roman thought to admit new forms of immortality. When the scientific school of the old Pythagorism came to an end in Italy in the fourth century, the sect perpetuated itself obscurely in mysterious conventicles, a sort of freemasonry of which the influence in the Hellenistic period is difficult to measure or circumscribe. It again took on new power in Alexandria under the Ptolemies. In this metropolis, in which all the currents of Europe and Asia were mingled, Pythagorism admitted at this time many ideas foreign to the teaching of the old master of Samos. This teaching seems not to have set forth a rigid, logically constructed theology, and the points of contact with the beliefs of the East, which its ideas supplied, favoured an accommodating syncretism. Pythagoras was said to have had Plato as a disciple, and Plato was venerated almost as much as the teacher he followed. The powerful structure of Stoic pantheism did not fail to exercise an ascendancy over the theorists of the school. This school had been, from its origin, in touch with the Orphic mysteries and those of Dionysos and it remained so, but it was also subject to the more remote influence of Babylonian and Egyptian religions, and particularly of those Chaldean doctrines which the Greeks had learnt to know after Alexander’s conquest.