Alcinous is the name that has come down to us in the manuscript tradition as the author of a handbook of Platonic doctrine, Didaskalikos tôn Platonos dogmatôn, probably from the second century CE. Following an 1879 suggestion by the German scholar Jacob Freudenthal, this figure was identified for more than a hundred years with the Middle Platonist philosopher known as Albinus, but this is now recognized to have been based on unsound assumptions, and the work has been returned to its shadowy author. The Didaskalikos has much in common with another second-century handbook of Platonism, the De Platone et eius dogmate of Apuleius, but the similarities are not close enough to indicate that they emanate from the same school.

The Didaskalikos is an introduction to Platonism as it was understood in the first and second centuries CE, which means that it...