  Numenius' best attested work is his treatise On the Dissension of the Academics from Plato (frs. 24–28). The Christian writer Eusebius in his Preparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel) has excerpted five long pieces from it (in book XIV). Eusebius quotes so extensively from this work in order to substantiate his claim, which permeates the entire Preparatio Evangelica, that ancient philosophers were in disagreement with each other. He takes that feature to indicate the inability of pagan philosophy to reach the truth. This is an originally skeptic argument, that is employed by Academic and Pyrrhonean skeptics alike, to the effect that dogmatic philosophy amounts to failure because of the disagreements occurring in it (Cicero, Academica II.115, Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians II.11). Eusebius has a special kind of disagreement in mind, namely that with Plato's philosophy, which he considers to have come closer to the truth than any other pagan philosophy (Prep. Ev. XI.pref. 2-3, XI.8.1, XIII.4.3). Numenius' testimony fits well an argument like that of Eusebius. For Numenius criticizes in this work the departure of the skeptical Academics from what he considers to be Plato's doctrine, namely, the doctrine of first principles of reality that Numenius finds adumbrated in the 2nd Letter attributed to Plato (fr.  24.51–6). For Numenius it is primarily the disagreement of the Academic skeptics with Plato's allegedly dogmatic philosophy that marks a failure. The surviving fragments of his work indicate Numenius' strong concern with the history of Platonism and are quite telling as to the tendencies of Platonism at his time. Numenius' reaction against a skeptical interpretation of Plato may have been triggered by attempts chronologically close to him, such as those by Anonymus in Theaetetum (1st c. CE?), Plutarch, and Favorinus (1st-2nd c. CE), to revive a form of academic skepticism (see Opsomer 1998). Three other works of Numenius, namely Epops, On Numbers, On place (Origen, Against Celsus IV.51; fr. 1c), were consulted by Origen but are only titles to us (see Zambon 2002, 180-181).