The Stoic Philosopher Posidonius
Posidonius of Apamea (c. 135–c. 50/51 BCE) was the thinker most influential in shaping the religious Stoicism that dominated the Greco-Roman world in the first century CE. He was a Greek philosopher teaching in Rome, and a mark of his influence was that his student Cicero later felt obliged to write a number of extended works debunking the thought of his teacher. Posidonius’s views were largely shaped by his reading of Plato (and to some extent Aristotle). His central affirmation is that communion and “sympathy” between the divine and created worlds is constant and permanent. This “cosmic sympathy” meant that any movement in one part of the universe affected others, like touching a cosmic mobile, thus making it possible to read divine signs in nature. Likewise, a spiritual force in every human soul—one’s daimon, like the famous daimon of Socrates—makes possible communion with the divine in numerous ways, especially through dreams.