 In Ammonius’ day, Alexandria, unlike Athens, was an important center of Christian cult and culture, the third See of Christendom. The school founded by Horapollo, where after Hermeias joined it the two main courses of study were rhetoric and philosophy, was a hub of the ‘Hellenic’ pagan learning, religion and culture. Apparently, Christian professors taught there as well, however, though the latter tended to lecture in their homes on Fridays, leaving the school largely to the pagans on that day (Zacharias, Life of Severus p. 23 Kugener); certainly, there were Christian students in the classes of both their co-religionists and the Hellenes. The atmosphere in Ammonius’ classroom is (too?) vividly portrayed in Ammonius or On the Creation of the World, written by one such Christian student, Zacharias of Maiuma (Gaza’s port-city), the later Bishop of Mytilene, who studied with Ammonius in Alexandria between 485 and 487. Zacharias’ book recounts discussions between ‘The Christian’, presumably Zacharias himself, and ‘Ammonius’ in front of the classroom; there is also (perhaps added later, after Ammonius’ death: Watts 2005) a discussion with the medical philosopher (iatrosophistēs) Gesius, said to have been Ammonius’ best student at the time. This recounting of the ‘dialogues in the Platonic manner’ (1. 7–8) should not be taken as historical: it is embellished by Zacharias with various references to Platonic dialogues and their digs at sophists; the arguments themselves largely depend upon another contemporary work, the Theophrastus by Aeneas of Gaza, which has no express connection with Ammonius. But Zacharias portrays Ammonius’ classroom as a battle over the souls of a mixture of committed pagans and Christians, and some students leaning one way or the other. Zacharias’ contempt for Ammonius and for Platonic philosophy is evident, and their discussion ends with Ammonius’ embarrassed silence. That the school could be a focus of hostile Christian attention had been made abundantly clear by the lynching of Hypatia at the hands of an Alexandrian mob in 415. Questions thus arise about the relation of the school to what Damascius in his Life of Isidore calls ‘the dominant doctrine’. How did the school manage to keep going as a largely pagan institution in a strongly Christian city? Did the philosophers in the school make any concessions, doctrinal or otherwise, to the Christian authorities? Was the school enabled to continue teaching Platonic philosophy with some pagan professors into the 530’s by a concession of Ammonius’ to the Christian authorities?