The belief in a celestial immortality which was thus propagated by the half philosophical, half religious sect of the Pythagoreans was to find a powerful interpreter in a thinker who had a predominant influence over his contemporaries and the succeeding generation—in Posidonius. We know little of his life. Born at Apamea in Syria, about the year 135, he early left his native country, of which he seems to have kept a poor opinion, and as a young student in Athens he attended the lectures of the older Stoic Panaetius. The universal curiosity which was to make him a scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge soon impelled him to take long journeys, in which he even reached the shores of the Atlantic and studied the tides of the ocean. Upon his return he opened a school in the free city of Rhodes and there numbered Cicero among his hearers. When he died at the age of eighty-four the prestige he enjoyed both in the Roman world and among the Greeks was immense. He owed his intellectual ascendancy as much to the marvellous variety of the knowledge which he displayed, as philosopher, astronomer, historian, geographer and naturalist, as to his copious, harmonious and highly coloured style. A theologian rather than a logician, a scholar rather than a critic, he did not construct an original metaphysical system comparable to those of the great founders of schools. But Posidonius was the most prominent representative of that syncretism which, as we have seen, showed itself in the Pythagoreans before his day and which reigned in the world about him, because men were weary of the sterile discussions of opposing thinkers. He gave the support of his authority and his eloquence to the eclecticism which reconciled the principles of the ancient Greek schools. Moreover, his Syrian origin led him to combine these doctrines with the religious ideas of the East, which had with astrology given the Hellenes a new conception of man and of the gods.[77] It is exactly here that Posidonius is important from the point of view of our subject: his tendencies represent a direct reaction against the scepticism of his master Panaetius, who denied both the survival of the soul[78] and the possibility of divination. Posidonius introduced into Stoicism momentous ideas derived at once from Pythagorism and from Eastern cults, and sought to establish them firmly by connecting them with a system of the world, which his vast intelligence had sought to understand in all its aspects. His faith in immortality is strictly related to his cosmography and receives support from his physics.