Almost nothing of Paulus Alexandrinus's personal life survives; he is known to modern scholarship almost entirely through his single surviving major work and is conventionally dated by an internal reference to 378 CE, giving his floruit rather than birth or death years. He worked in Alexandria, by the fourth century a city with a long established tradition of Hellenistic astrological teaching stretching back through Ptolemy and Vettius Valens, and his own writing situates him as a teacher consolidating and transmitting that older tradition rather than an innovator proposing new technique.
His Eisagogika, or Introduction to Astrology, was well enough regarded in antiquity to attract a substantial explanatory commentary from the sixth century Alexandrian philosopher Olympiodorus, a mark of the text's continued use as a standard teaching handbook nearly two centuries after its composition. Through Byzantine transmission and, in part, Arabic translation, Paulus's systematic presentation became one of the channels by which Hellenistic astrological technique reached both medieval Byzantine and Islamic astrologers.
Olympiodorus's commentary, delivered as a series of lectures at Alexandria in 564 CE, survives independently and gives modern scholars a rare direct window onto how a late antique Alexandrian teacher explained Paulus's technical material to his own students, a layered transmission, teacher explaining teacher, that is unusually well documented for a Hellenistic astrological text.