can hardly be otherwise than a short period to allow for the necessary intimacy with his teaching to have been formed.
But we are carried back one step further still.

It is not only Ptolemaeus but Ptolemaeus _and his party_ ([Greek: hoi peri Ptolemaion]) [Endnote 256:1].

There has been time for Ptolemaeus to found a school within a school of his own; and his school has already begun to express its opinions, either collectively or through its individual members.
In this way the real date of Ptolemaeus seems still to recede, but I will not endeavour any further to put a numerical value upon it which might be thought to be prejudiced.

It will be best for the reader to fill up the blank according to his own judgment.
Heracleon will to a certain extent go with Ptolemaeus, with whom he is persistently coupled, though, as he is only mentioned once by Irenaeus, the data concerning him are less precise.

They are however supplemented by an allusion in the fourth book of the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria (which appears to have been written in the last decade of the century) to Heracleon as one of the chief of the school of Valentinus [Endnote 257:1], and perhaps also by a statement of Origen to the effect that Heracleon was said to be a [Greek: gnorimos] of Valentinus himself [Endnote 257:2].
The meaning of the latter term is questioned, and it is certainly true that it may stand for pupil or scholar, as Elisha was to Elijah or as the Apostles were to their Master; but that it could possibly be applied to two persons who never came into personal contact must be, I cannot but think, very doubtful.