In this perspective he was following a trail first blazed by a fellow Alexandrian a century and a half
earlier, the Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Jesus who attempted to clothe the Septuagint in amenable patterns from Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism.11 His synthetic effort is echoed throughout the corpus of Clement's writings, which are far less
systematic in approach than one would wish; the Stromata («Miscellanies») is less an orderly
treatment of theological topics than a series of notes woven into a tapestry whose warp and woof are difficult to discern.12