other · 203 · Alexandria
His father Leonides had been beheaded the year before and the family property confiscated. Eusebius says that at that time there was no one at Alexandria to give instruction in the faith, as all were driven away by the threat of persecution, and that some of the heathen came to Origen to hear the word of God — he was in his eighteenth year when he took charge of the catechetical school. He did not found it: it had been Pantaenus' and then Clement's, and Clement had left the city when the blow fell. Plutarch was his first pupil and was martyred; Heraclas, Plutarch's brother, was the second, and would eventually inherit both the school and the bishopric. Origen sold his library of classical literature for a small daily allowance and lived on it, and Eusebius reports the austerities with a certain amount of awe. The disputed act of self-mutilation that Eusebius also reports from this period is not given a row here: it is contested in the sources and in the scholarship, and an event carries a year and renders as fact.
Nothing planned. The teachers had fled and enquirers kept arriving, so the boy who had stayed began teaching them.
Twenty-eight years of the Alexandrian school, and the beginning of the largest body of writing any early Christian produced.