Gnosticism, therefore, was bound to become ethical as well as gnostical, or, in other words, to insist on the efficacy of conduct as well as of knowledge, so soon as it came into contact with thinkers trained in philosophy. Where it did so, in the first instance, cannot be told with any degree of certainty; but all probability points to Alexandria as one of the places where the post-Christian Gnosticism first made alliance with philosophic learning. Not only was Alexandra the natural meeting-place of Greeks and Orientals, but it was at the early part of the IInd century a great deal more the centre of the intellectual world than either Athens or Rome. Although Ptolemy IX Physcon is said to have expelled from it the philosophers and scholars of the Museum, they seem to have returned shortly afterwards, and in the meantime their dispersion in the neighbouring cities and islands, where most of them must have supported themselves by teaching, probably did a good deal towards diffusing the taste for philosophy over a wider area than before. In Philo’s time, in particular, the Platonic philosophy had gained such a hold in the city that he, though a leader of the Jews, had had to assimilate it as best he might[298], and, as we have seen, to bring it more or less into harmony with the traditional beliefs of his own people. A century later we see the same thing occurring with the now rising sect of Christians; and a school of Christian philosophy was founded in Alexandria under the leadership of Pantaenus, the predecessor in office of the famous Clement of Alexandria[299]. If we may judge from the writings of this last, the expressed object of this school was to instil a knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy into Christian teachers, to bring about which it attempted to show that, while both philosophy and Christian theology alike aimed at the discovery of truth, the valuable parts of the philosophic doctrines were borrowed or derived from the writings held sacred by Jews and Christians[300]. Nor were the Alexandrians in the least likely to refuse a hearing to any new faith however wild. The leading place which Alexandria had gained among the markets of the world brought within its gates the adherents of every religion then known, and Jewish merchants and Christian artizans there mixed with Buddhist monks and fetish-worshippers from Central Asia, while the terms on which they met compelled a wide tolerance for one another’s opinions, and predisposed its citizens to a practical amalgam of several apparently conflicting creeds[301].