In the case of two Greeks, Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, and Molo, no Egyptian influence can be shown. Both were among the most influential men of their time. Molo’s career and importance have been briefly sketched. To Posidonius must be assigned a still more powerful intellectual influence over his generation and those that followed.[226] The leader of the Stoic school or, as it may well be called, sect, he so reorganized its teaching that the Stoa became nothing else than the dominant faith among cultivated men, a situation perhaps paralleled by Confucianism in China, which is also an ethical philosophy that finds it possible to dwell on terms of comity with various forms of cruder popular belief. What Molo’s philosophic affiliations were is not easy to determine. The Stoics were nearer than most other schools to rhetoricians and grammarians, but many men of these professions acknowledged allegiance to the Academy, to Epicureanism, or even to the revived Pythagoreanism of the first century B.C.E. Of the extensive writings of the Rhodian rhetorician there is not enough left to give even a probable answer. But most philosophic sects laid stress on the universality of their teachings, and were marked by an intense intellectual rationalism. The crude psychology of those days made the formation of categories a simple thing. Thinkers could scarcely be expected to admit that inherited instincts could qualify the truth of a philosophic dogma. More particularly, the philosophic movements were powerful solvents of nationalism. Even the distinction between Greek and barbarian did not exist in theory for them.[227] The notion of the state and the maintenance of its ancestral rites became for them a meaningless but innocuous form, which men of common sense would not despise, but to which one could attach no great importance. Face to face with congregations like those of the Jews, which enforced their separation by stringent religious prohibitions, the Stoics more than others found their opposition roused. More than others, because many Stoics adopted from the Cynical school the methods of the diatribe, the popular sermon, and, indeed, made an active attempt to carry the universality of their principles into practice. And the Stoics, more than others, would find the height of irrationality in the stubborn insistence on forms for which only an historical justification could be found.