In a recent article, George Boys-Stones (2018b) offered an interesting definition of the Imperial Platonist conception of authority. According to him, contrary to the members of the other Hellenistic schools, the Middle Platonists do not aim to acquire a sum of propositional knowledge to be preserved within the school. Plato’s authority was for them not that of a founder of a school, but that of a man who had seen the intelligible Forms and discovered a truth to which all subsequent Platonists aspired. According to Boys-Stones, this conception of authority goes hand in hand with a certain epistemological perspective, the traces of which we can find in the fragments of Numenius, most notably in how he thinks of the relation between the second and the third God (fr. 11 des Places). The perspective of this paper is slightly different.