The ten books of Stromata (in which Origen compared the teaching of the Christians with that of the philosophers, and corroborated all the Christian dogmas from Plato, Aristotle, Numenius and Cornutus) have all perished, with the exception of small fragments; so have the tractates on the resurrection and on freewill.2 6.
In Rome he lectured on rhetoric and philosophy, and collected around him many eminent pupils, amongst whom Cicero was the most famous and the most enthusiastic. None of his works is extant; our knowledge of his views is derived from Numenius, Sextus Empiricus and Cicero.
As forerunners of Neoplatonism we may regard, on the one hand, those Stoics who accepted the Platonic distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible, and, on the other hand, the so-called Neopythagoreans and religious philosophers like Plutarch of Chaeronea and especially Numenius of Apamea.
The Jewish and Christian thinkers of the first two centuries approach considerably nearer than Numenius to the later Neoplatonism.'
The ibis is somewhat larger than a curlew, Numenius arquata, which bird it resembles, with a much stouter bill and stouter legs.