§1. Plotinus, the philosopher active during our1 own lifetime, gave the impression of being embarrassed about having a body; he certainly could not stand talking about his race, his parents, or his original homeland.2 He so disliked the idea of being painted or sculpted that5 when Amelius asked him to allow an image to be made, he said: ‘Isn’t it enough that I have to carry around the image that nature has clothed me with?’ Did he have to consent to leave behind a longer-lasting image of this image as if it were something worth looking at? Since he10 made it clear that, for this reason, he would refuse to sit for a portrait, Amelius got Carterius – the best painter of his generation, who happened to be his friend – to come to Plotinus’ seminar and meet him. (Anyone who wanted was allowed to attend these seminars.) Amelius had him concentrate on looking at Plotinus so that, over time, he acquired a clear mental image of him; he then drew a picture15 of the image thus laid down in his memory. Amelius corrected the sketch to make it as true to life as possible; and in this way, the skill of Carterius furnished us with a very close likeness of Plotinus and Plotinus knew nothing about it.
§2. He often suffered from bowel trouble, but would not tolerate having an enema; he said it was not appropriate for an old man to undergo that sort of therapy. He would not agree to take medicines derived from wild animals either; he did not, he said, want to derive5 nourishment from the bodies even of domesticated animals. He stayed away from the baths, but used to be rubbed down daily at home until, during a severe outbreak of plague, the people who rubbed him down were among those who died. He gave up the treatment then, but soon afterwards became afflicted with terrible10 throat infections. While I was with him he never showed symptoms of anything of the sort, but after I went away he got the illness so badly that, when I got back, Eustochius – a friend who was with him until he died – told me that he lost the clarity and depth of his voice, his sight15 was blurred, and his feet and hands ulcerated. This meant that his friends, of whom he always wanted to ask questions,3 had to be turned away, so he left the city for Zethus’ estate in Campania. (Zethus was an old friend of his who had died.) His needs were supplied from Zethus’20 estate, or brought from that of Castricius in Minturno (Minturno was where Castricius had his property). When he was on the verge of death, Eustochius was slow in getting to him (as he told us) because25 he was staying in Puteoli: ‘I have been hanging on for you,’ said Plotinus. He breathed his last with the words ‘Try to elevate the god within us to the divine in the universe’; and a snake slid under the bed in which he lay and disappeared into a hole that happened to be there in the wall. It was towards the end of the second year of Claudius’ reign, and he was 66, so Eustochius said. When he died, I,30 Porphyry, happened to be residing in Lilybaeus; Amelius was in Apamea, in Syria, and Castricius was in Rome. Only Eustochius was with him.
Counting backwards 66 years from the second year of Claudius’35 reign [CE 270], Plotinus’ birth falls in the thirteenth year of the reign of Severus [CE 204]; but he never revealed to anyone the month of his birth, or when his birthday was, since he did not think that anyone should sacrifice or hold a feast for him – although40 he would himself sacrifice and hold feasts for his companions on the traditional birthdays of Plato and Socrates, when he would require those who could to read out a discourse in front of everyone present.
§3. He, however, often quite spontaneously offered information about himself when he was in company, such as the fact that he used to go to his nurse, bare her breasts, and ask to suckle even when5 he was 7 years old and going to school. He was, however, shamed into stopping when she once called him an obnoxious brat. He was attracted to philosophy at the age of 27, and went to the best regarded philosophers in Alexandria, but he came away from their lectures depressed and miserable. He told one of his friends what10 was wrong, and the friend, who understood what his soul was yearning for, took him off to hear Ammonius, whom he had not yet tried. When Plotinus saw and heard him he said to his friend: ‘This is the man I was looking for!’ From that day, he remained with Ammonius constantly. He acquired such a philosophical disposition that he15 became keen to try and learn the philosophy practised among the Persians, too, and the system perfected by the Indians. When the emperor Gordian was about to lead a campaign against the Persians, he signed up for it and went with him. He was 38 then,20 having been studying with Ammonius for eleven years. Gordian was wiped out in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus only just escaped to safety in Antioch. Philip took power, and Plotinus, then aged 40, went up to Rome. Erennius, Origen, and Plotinus had made pacts not to25 reveal the doctrines that Ammonius expounded in his lectures, and Plotinus, although he took pupils of his own, took care to keep the doctrines of Ammonius to himself. Erennius was the first to violate the pact, and once he had done so Origen followed suit – though30 Origen wrote nothing except the treatise On Daemons, and a treatise dedicated to Gallienus called That the King is the Only Creator. Plotinus wrote nothing for a long time, though he gave talks based on his seminars with Ammonius. And so he spent ten whole35 years running seminars of his own, but writing nothing. Since he encouraged those who attended to ask questions, his talks were, as Amelius told us, very disorderly and unstructured. Amelius went to Plotinus in the third year of Philip’s reign [CE 245/6] and stayed until40 the first year of Claudius’ [CE 268/9] so that he was with him for 24 whole years. When he arrived, he had a disposition shaped by the seminars he had taken with Lysimachus; but he was more hardworking than any of his contemporaries, shown by the fact that he had45 written out and assembled pretty well the whole of Numenius – and learnt most of it by heart. He wrote commentaries based on Plotinus’ seminars, and composed a hundred or so books of notes, which he bestowed upon Hostilianus Hesychius of Apamea, his adopted son.
§4. In the tenth year of the reign of Gallienus [CE 262/3], I, Porphyry, came from Greece with Antony of Rhodes, and got to know Amelius, who was by then in his eighteenth year with Plotinus. (He had not yet5 found the ambition to write anything except the notes, and they did not yet extend to 100 books.)
In the tenth year of the reign of Gallienus, Plotinus was around 59. When I, Porphyry, first met him, I was 30. Plotinus had turned to writing on topics that occurred to him in the first year of Gallienus’10 reign; by the tenth year of Gallienus’ reign, when I, Porphyry, first got to know him, he had written 21 books. I found out that even they had not been circulated widely. At this time, he did not find it an easy matter15 to give out copies. He felt a sense of responsibility, and would not do it just like that, without a second thought, but only after a careful assessment of the recipients.4
He did not give these works titles, and they were known by various titles given by different people. The following are the generally accepted titles (I shall also give the opening words of the books, so20 that each of the books listed here will be easily recognized from its opening):
1. On Beauty (1.6): Beauty is found for the most part in what is seen …
2. On the Immortality of the Soul (4.7): Whether each one of us is25 immortal …
3. On Fate (3.1): All things that come into being …
4. On the Substantiality of the Soul (4.2): It is in the intelligible cosmos that true Substantiality is to be found …
5. On Intellect, Ideas, and Being (5.9): All human beings, when they30 are born …
6. On the Descent of Souls into Bodies (4.8): Often, after waking up to myself …
7. How That Which is After the First Comes From the First, and on the One (5.4): If there is something after that which is first …35
8. On Whether All Souls are One (4.9): Is it the case that …
9. On the Good or the One (6.9): All beings are beings due to unity …40
10. On the Three Primary Hypostases (5.1): What can it be, therefore, that has made the souls …
11. On the Generation and Order of the Things Which Come After the First (5.2): The One is all things …
12. On the Two Kinds of Matter (2.4): All who have arrived at a45 conception of so-called matter …
13. Various Considerations (3.9): Intellect, Plato says, sees the Ideas …
14. On the Circular Motion (2.2)5: Why does it move in a circle?50
15. On Our Allotted Daemon (3.4): While some real existents …
16. On Existing From the Body (1.9): You shall not expel your body so that it does not go …
17. On Quality (2.6)6: Are Being and Substance different?55
18. On Whether or not There are Ideas of Individuals (5.7): Is there an Idea of each individual?
20. On Dialectic (1.3): So what craft or procedure …
21. How the Soul is Said to be a Mean Between Undivided and Divided Being 2 (4.1)7
These are the 21 works that he was found to have written when65 Porphyry first came to him. Plotinus was then 59.
§5. I, Porphyry, was with him for this year and the following five years without a break – for I came to Rome a little before the end of Gallienus’ first ten years in power. (It was summer, and Plotinus was not working; but he still held gatherings.) In these six years, we explored many topics in5 our seminars. Amelius and I asked him to write, and he wrote:
22, 23. That Being, One and Identical, is Simultaneously Everywhere Whole – Two Books (6.4–5):
1. The first of these opens: Is soul present everywhere …10
2. The second opens: That that which is one and identical in number …
He went straight on to write the next two [5.6; 2.5]:
24. The first of these was: On the Fact That That Which Transcends Being Does not Think and on What the Primary Thinking is and What is Secondary (5.6): There is one type of thinking which is by a subject that is other than its object …15
25. The second was: On ‘Potentially’ and ‘Actually’ (2.5): One thing is said to be potentially …
26. And next in turn: On the Impassibility of Things Without Body (3.6): Let us say that acts of sense-perception are not affections …
27. On Soul 1 (4.3)8: Concerning the soul, the right course …20
28. On the Soul 2 (4.4)9: What, then, will he say …
29. On the Soul 3 (4.5)10: Since we have earlier postponed …25
30. On Contemplation (3.8)11: If, before attempting to be serious …
31. On the Intelligible Beauty (5.8): Since we are saying …
32. On Intellect, and That the Intelligibles of are not Outside the Intellect, and on the One (5.5)12: The true and real Intellect …30
34. On Numbers (6.6): Is multiplicity …35
35. On How it is That Distant Things Appear Small (2.8)13: Do things that are far away appear smaller …
36. On Whether Happiness Increases With Time (1.5): Does being40 happy increase with time?
37. On Complete Blending (2.7): Regarding the so-called complete blending …
38. How the Multiplicity of Ideas Came to Exist, and on the Good (6.7): When god sent the souls to come to be …
39. On the Voluntary (6.8)14: Can one so much as raise the45 question …
40. On the Cosmos (2.1): When we say that the cosmos has always existed …
41. On Sense-Perception and on Memory (4.6): Since we maintain50 that acts of sense-perception are not ‘imprints’ …
42. On the Genera of Being 1 (6.1): How many beings there are and which they are …
43. On the Genera of Being 2 (6.2): Since we have conducted an investigation …
44. On the Genera of Being 3 (6.3): We have said what we think55 about Substance …
45. On Eternity and Time (3.7): When we say that eternity and time …
These works, 24 of them, he wrote in the six-year period when I,60 Porphyry, was with him, taking his topics from questions he was engaged with at the time, something I made clear in my key-point summaries for each work. Added to the 21 works he wrote before we arrived, that makes 45 in all.
§6. While I spent time in Sicily (I went there around the fifteenth year of Gallienus’ reign [AD 267/8]), Plotinus wrote these five works [1.4; 3.2; 3.3; 5.3; 3.5], and sent them to me:
46. On Happiness (1.4): If we suppose that living well and being5 happy …
47. On Providence 1 (3.2): Handing over the substantiality and constitution of this universe to spontaneity …
49. On the Knowing Hypostases and on That Which is Transcendent (5.3): Must that which thinks itself be variegated …
50. On Love (3.5): On the question of love, whether …
So he sent me these in the first year of the reign of Claudius. At the15 beginning of the second, shortly before he was to die, he sent these <four> [1.8; 2.3; 1.1; 1.7]:
51. On What Evils Are (1.8)15: Those who are seeking to discover where evils come from …
52. On Whether the Stars are Causes (2.3): The revolution of the20 stars …
53. What is the Living Being (1.1)16: Pleasures and pains …
54. On Happiness (1.7)17: Could one say that the good for each thing is different …
The first two blocks make up 45 works, bringing the number to 54.25 Some of them, then, were written when he was young, others when he was at the height of his powers, and others when he was physically unwell. The power of the books reflects this. The first 21 are somewhat30 lacking in power, not powerful enough to have real impact. But the middle period of published works clearly reveals the height of his power. These 24 works could not (apart from the short ones) be better. The last35 nine were written when his power was already on the wane – and more so the final four than the five before them.
§7. He had a large following, and people with a thirst for philosophy gathered around him. They included Amelius of Tuscany, whose family name was Gentilianus. Plotinus preferred to call him Amerius, with an ‘r’: he said that it was more appropriate for him to be called5 partless [amerios] than careless [amelios].
There was a doctor from Scythopolis called Paulinus, whom Amelius nicknamed Mikkalos, because he always struck the wrong note.18
There was another doctor, Eustochius of Alexandria, who got to know him towards the end of his life and stayed in his service until his10 death, studying only with Plotinus’ circle. He acquired the disposition of a true philosopher.
There was also with him Zoticus, the critic and poet, who edited the text of Antimachus, and rendered the story of Atlantis into verse, very poetically.19 He lost his sight and died shortly before Plotinus. (Paulinus15 also died before Plotinus.)
One of his companions was Zethus, an Arab by extraction. He had married the daughter of Theodosius, who was friends with Ammonius. He, too, was a doctor, and devoted to Plotinus. He was interested in20 politics, and had political inclinations, which Plotinus tried to check. They were like family, and Plotinus used to stay with him at his estate, which was some six miles this side of Minturnae. Castricius, known as Firmus, had bought it. He was the greatest connoisseur alive during our25 lifetime, and revered Plotinus. He was also a good servant to Amelius, serving him in all things; and he was attached to me, Porphyry, and treated me in all matters like a brother. He too revered Plotinus, then – even though he had chosen a political life.
Quite a few Senators attended his lectures: Marcellus Orrontius30 and Sabinillus in particular worked at philosophy. Another Senator was Rogantianus who came to reject this life to such an extent that he gave up his possessions, dismissed his slaves, and resigned his35 position. He was due to be inducted into the office of Praetor – the Lictors were even there. But he not only refused to go on, he resigned all public office. After he relinquished the management of his own household as well, he would dine and sleep at the houses of various friends and acquaintances, only eating every other day. As a result of40 his renunciation and abstinence he recovered from his gout, which had been so severe that he used to be carried about in a chair; and whereas before he could not stretch out his fingers, he became more agile than craftsmen used to working with their hands. Plotinus took him into his45 inner circle and was full of praise for him – eventually adducing him as a good example for philosophers.
Serapion of Alexander was with him, too – originally an orator, but afterwards also interested in philosophical argument. But he did not stay the course. He found himself unable to renounce his possessions and give up usury.
I, Porphyry of Tyre, was also a friend of Plotinus, admitted to his50 inner circle. He asked me to edit his writings, §8.20 for he himself, once he had written something, could not bear to revisit it a second time. Indeed, he could not even read it through once, since his eyesight made reading difficult. He wrote without aiming for beauty in the individual letters, without keeping syllables distinct, and without5 any concern for spelling. All he minded about was the meaning. And he kept writing until his death, which amazed us all. He would go through the whole issue by himself, from beginning to end, then he would commit his argument to writing, getting down what he had10 worked out in his soul without hesitation, as if he were copying the writing out of a book. He could conduct a conversation with someone about another issue, and keep on top of the conversation without ever taking his mind from the matter he was thinking about. When the15 person he was talking to left, he would not read over what he had already written – as I said, his sight was not up to reading. He would simply move to the next point, continuing the text as if the conversation had been no interruption at all. So he kept his own company at the same time as being with others, and never relaxed his attention20 to himself, or his constant reversion to intellect. (If he did so it was only when he slept; and he did that very little thanks to his modest diet – often he would not eat any bread.)
§9. Plotinus also attracted women who were devoted to philosophy. There was Gemina, in whose house he lived, and her daughter, who like her mother was called Gemina; and there was Amphicleia, who was the5 wife of Ariston, son of Iamblichus, also devoted to philosophy. Furthermore, a number of men and women of the highest social order brought their male and female offspring to him when they were about to die. They would entrust them to him along with what remained of their property, treating his protection as sacred and god-like. For this reason,10 Plotinus’ house was full of boys and girls – among them Potamo, whose education he took such pains over that he would often listen even to revisions of his compositions. He would minutely scrutinize the accounts submitted by their trustees, and insisted that as long as they did not take up philosophy their possessions and revenues should15 remain untouched and secure. Plotinus, then, although he never relaxed his mental concentration so long as he was awake, undertook his share of responsibility for the lives and concerns of other people – many of them. He was, to those who had any dealings with him, kind and accessible.20 For this reason, although he lived for 26 whole years in Rome, and acted as arbiter in many cases of personal dispute, he never made a single enemy in his public life.
§10. Among those with pretensions to philosophy it was different: Olympius of Alexandria, who had studied with Ammonius for a while, wanted to be pre-eminent as a philosopher and hated him. He used5 magic to attack him, trying to get him star-struck. When he realized that the attempt had only rebounded on himself, he said to his acquaintances that the power of Plotinus’ soul was so great that he could deflect attacks made against him onto those who were trying to do him harm. Plotinus for his part was aware of Olympius’ efforts, and said that his10 body then felt like ‘a purse being drawn shut’ [Symp. 190d], his limbs being pressed together. Olympius saw that he would suffer much worse things himself than anything he could hope to do to Plotinus, and gave up trying.
Plotinus did indeed have some natural endowment that set him apart. An Egyptian priest once came to Rome and met him through a15 mutual friend. Wanting to give a demonstration of his wisdom, he invited Plotinus to come and see him summon his guardian daemon. Plotinus readily agreed, and the invocation took place in the temple of20 Isis, since the Egyptian said that this was the only pure place he could find in Rome. When he called upon Plotinus’ daemon to appear, it was a god that came, rather than a member of the genus of daemons. As the Egyptian said: ‘You are blessed, since you have a god as your daemon, and are not accompanied by a member of the lower genus.’ They were25 not able to ask or learn more while it was there, since one of their friends, who was watching with them, strangled the birds he was holding as protection – whether deliberately, through envy, or in a moment of panic. In any case, the fact that Plotinus was accompanied by a daemon of superior divinity led him to raise his god-like vision30 towards it. This is why he wrote the book On Our Allotted Daemon [3.4], in which he tries to explain why different people have different guardians.
Amelius was fond of sacrifices, and used to busy himself with rites of the new moon, and rites to allay fears. He once tried to get Plotinus to35 participate with him, but Plotinus said: ‘They must come to me, not I to them.’ We did not know what consideration led him to make such a grand pronouncement, and did not have the nerve to ask him.
§11. He was possessed of an extraordinary degree of insight. Once, when Chione had a very valuable necklace stolen (Chione was a pious widow who lived with him along with her children), the slaves were5 brought before his view. He looked at them all: ‘This is the thief!’ he said, pointing to one of them. The man was whipped, and for a long time denied it; but eventually he confessed, fetched what he had stolen, and returned it. Plotinus would foretell how each of the children living with him would turn out. For example, he said what Polemo would be like:10 amorous and short-lived; and so he was. And once he saw me, Porphyry, when I was thinking about ending my life. He suddenly presented himself to me while I was spending time at home, and said that this desire of mine was not the product of considered thought, but of15 pathological melancholy; and he told me to leave town. I obeyed him, and went to Sicily, since I had heard that a well-known man called Probus was staying near Lilybaeum. I was cured of my urge, but was prevented from being with Plotinus for the rest of his life.
§12. Gallienus the emperor and his wife Salonina honoured and revered Plotinus greatly. On the strength of his friendship with them, Plotinus asked them to rebuild a certain city in Campania, once said to have been a city of philosophers, which had fallen into ruins. He5 asked them to bestow the surrounding countryside on the city once it had been repopulated. The idea was that the inhabitants would live according to Plato’s laws, and the city would be called Platonopolis. Plotinus promised that he and his companions would move there. And the philosopher would very easily have had his wish, were it not that10 some of the emperor’s court stood in his way – whether through envy or resentment or some other unworthy cause.
§13. In our seminars, Plotinus was a fluent speaker, and very good at thinking through problems and finding ways through them, but sometimes he got words wrong. He would not say ‘remember’ but ‘merember’ – and there were other oddities of pronunciation which he replicated in5 his writing, too. When he spoke, his intellect was manifest even in the way it lit up his face. He was handsome to look at, but even more beautiful in those moments. He perspired a bit; he exuded kindliness; his face looked gentle but also intellectually rigorous when he was questioned. For three10 days I, Porphyry, questioned his account of the sense in which the soul was ‘in’ the body, and he patiently went through the arguments. Someone called Thaumasius, who was studying universal propositions, joined the seminar and wanted to hear Plotinus speaking on texts: he could not stand Porphyry’s responding and questioning. However, Plotinus said: ‘But if we cannot solve Porphyry’s difficulties when he asks them, how will we be able to say anything at all when faced with a text?’21
§14. Plotinus’ writing is concise, but packed with meaning; brief and more abundant in ideas than in words, inspiring and passionate about almost everything; a combination of personal insight and respect for tradition. Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines are blended into his writings,5 though they are not obvious; and it contains the concentrated essence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. No so-called ‘geometrical’ or ‘arithmetical’ theorem evaded him, nor those of mechanics, optics, or music – though he himself was not specially trained to work in these areas.10
In our seminars, he would have commentaries read out, those of Severus, Cronius, Numenius, Gaius or Atticus; or (from the Peripatetics) those of Aspasius, Alexander, and Adrastus – and whoever was to hand. None of these was given the last word: he always had his own view. His way of thinking was distinctive, and he adopted Ammonius’15 mind-set in his enquiries. It was not long before he had heard enough to find a profound issue to apply his mind to. Once Longinus’ On First Principles was read for him, and his Antiquity Lover: ‘Longinus is a philologist,’20 he said, ‘but not at all a philosopher.’22 On another occasion, Origen appeared at a seminar. Plotinus blushed deeply and wanted to leave. Origen asked him to keep speaking, but he said that all desire to do so is crushed when the speaker sees that he is speaking to those who know what he is going to say. And so he said a little, and left.25
§15. I read a poem called The Holy Marriage at the Feast for Plato, and because a lot of it was expressed obliquely, in the mystical language of inspiration, someone said ‘Porphyry is mad!’ In everyone’s hearing, he said to me: ‘You proved yourself to be at once poet, philosopher, and5 priest.’ The rhetor Diophanes read out a piece justifying Alcibiades as he appears in Plato’s Symposium, arguing that as a price for an education in virtue, a pupil should make himself sexually available if his teacher wanted it. Plotinus kept starting up to leave the gathering, but refrained10 from doing so. After the lecture broke up, he charged me, Porphyry, to write a counter-argument. Diophanes did not want to give me his text, so I based my response on my memory of his lines of argument. When I read it to a gathering of the same audience, Plotinus was so happy with15 me that in our seminars he would constantly add: ‘Shoot like this, if you want to illuminate men.’23
Eubulus, Plato’s successor in Athens, sent Plotinus treatises concerning certain questions of Platonic interpretation. He caused them to be given to20 me, asking me to think of answers, and to let him know what I thought.
Plotinus dealt with astronomical tables, though not in great technical detail. He addressed the efficacy of horoscopes more closely, and in the25 many places where he saw something unwarranted in what the treatises claimed he did not hold back from refutation.
§16. During his lifetime, Christianity attracted a diverse popular following, as did movements which drew on ancient philosophy. Followers of Adelphius and Aquilinus got hold of most of the writings5 of Alexander of Lybia, Philocomus, Demostratus, and Lydus, and published the revelations of Zoroaster, Zostrianus, Nicotheus, Allogenes, and Messus. There were others of the sort. They deceived many people – indeed, they were themselves deluded. As if Plato had not come to grips with the profundity of intelligible substance! Plotinus himself refuted them on many points in the course of our10 seminars, and he wrote a book which we called Against the Gnostics [2.9]; but he left it to us to judge the rest. Amelius managed to write 40 books against the Book of Zostrianius. I, Porphyry, composed a15 continuous series of arguments against the Book of Zoroaster, proving beyond doubt that it is a recent forgery, fabricated by the sect’s adherents to give the impression that the doctrines they themselves approve are those of the ancient Zoroaster.
§17. Some people from Greece said that Plotinus had been presenting as his own the doctrines of Numenius. Trypho, the Stoic and Platonist, told Amelius this and Amelius wrote a book which he called On Plotinus’ Doctrinal Distance from Numenius. He dedicated it to5 ‘Basileus’, meaning me. (‘Basileus’ is another way of referring to me, instead of ‘Porphyry’. In my native language I am called Malkus, which was also the name my father had; but malkus translated into10 Greek is basileus [‘king’]. This is why Longinus, when he dedicated his On Impulse to Cleodamus and me, Porphyry, wrote ‘To Cleodamus and Malkus’. So Amelius translated my name, and just as Numenius changed Maximus [‘Greatest’] to Megalos [‘Great’], so he changed Malkus to Basileus.) This is what he wrote:15
‘Amelius to Basileus: greetings. You know very well that I would not have said a word just because certain fine gentlemen have been spreading the view that the doctrines of our friend derive from Numenius of Apamea – a view which you say has reached your own hearing. It is too20 obvious that it is an example of the sort of glib and specious position they revere so much. First of all, they say that he is a complete fool, then they say that he is a plagiarist, and finally they accuse him of dealing with trivialities. It is obvious that their attacks are just satire. But you think25 that we should use the occasion of their attack to set down our own beliefs, to make them easier for us to recall, and at the same time to make both them and the name of our friend, the great Plotinus, more widely known – though they have for a long time been in the public domain. For this reason, I hereby present my account, worked up in three days,30 as you already know. You must forgive me for the fact that I have not been guided by his own writings in my composition or in the selection of topics, but went back to when we used to meet, and put things down in the order they happened to arise. The main reason I did this was that Plotinus has been brought to trial here by certain people for an outlook35 which he shares with us, an outlook which it is not easy to pick up from his published work because of his tendency to treat of the same topics in different ways in different places, as he sees fit. I am sure that, if I end up defacing any of the doctrines, all of which I have gone to our shared philosophical home to find, you will be kind enough to put me right. As40 the tragedy says somewhere, I felt like a “meddler, correcting and disclaiming”24 when faced with an account of our leader’s doctrines which is so far from the truth – but that only shows how great was my wish to please you completely. Farewell!’
§18. I decided to set out this letter to substantiate the claim that there were those who, during his lifetime, thought that Plotinus made his reputation by passing off Numenius’ doctrines as his own. I also did it to show that they thought him a ‘complete fool’, being contemptuous of him because they did not understand what he said, and because he5 avoided boastful rhetorical displays. They thought that he treated his seminars like social gatherings, and was slow to spell out the logical steps of his argument. I, Porphyry, got a similar impression when I first heard him – that is why I published a work against him in which I tried10 to show that the intelligible lies outside the intellect. Plotinus made Amelius read it out and, when he had done so, laughed and said: ‘Your job is to solve the problems into which he has fallen because he does not know what we think.’ Amelius wrote quite a large work Against the15 Difficulties Raised by Porphyry; I replied to this, and Amelius responded in his turn. At the third go, I, Porphyry, finally managed to understand what he was saying, and wrote a retraction, which I read out in a lecture. From then on, I put my faith in Plotinus’ books, and encouraged20 a desire in him, as my teacher, to set out his views in writing at greater length. He made Amelius keen to write as well.
§19. Longinus’ opinion of Plotinus, which was largely based on what I told him myself in my letters to him, can be seen from the following extract of a letter which he wrote to me. He was asking me to leave Sicily and go to him in Phoenicia, bringing the books of Plotinus, and this is5 what he said:
‘Send them, as soon as you think best; or, better still, bring them – for I am not going to stop asking you again and again to take the road that leads to me rather than the road that leads away. If for no other reason –10 for what wisdom could you expect to find here? – then come for old time’s sake, and for the air, which is ideal for the physical infirmity you speak about. You may have something else in mind, but don’t expect to find anything at all new here – nor, for that matter, those things from the past you say you have lost. There is such a scarcity of writers here that I15 have, by the gods, only just managed to get hold of the remaining works of Plotinus by taking my copyist away from his usual work, and setting him to work on this single task. And I have acquired what appears to be20 everything, including everything that you have been sending; but what I have is half-finished, for it has more than the usual number of errors. I thought our friend Amelius would remove the scribal errors, but he had other more urgent matters to attend to. So I do not know how I can get to grips with them. I am very keen to examine On the Soul and On25 Being,25 but these are more corrupt than any. I would dearly like to get accurately written copies from you – just for checking, then I would send them back. Or, again, I shall make the same argument: don’t send30 them, but I would much rather you bring them yourself, these and anything else that Amelius might have missed. I have been careful to acquire everything he brought: would I not want to keep his commentaries, worthy as they are of all reverence and honour? I told you, when you were here, and a long way away, and spending time around Tyre,35 that I have not been able to go along with many of his suggestions; but I am impressed by the character of the writing, by the density of the man’s thoughts, and by the extraordinarily philosophical disposition of the enquiries. I love them, and I would say that seekers ought to consider his40 books among the most outstanding.’
§20. These things I repeat at length from the greatest critic of our lifetime, a man who discussed almost everything written by all of his other contemporaries. It shows how he came to view Plotinus – although at first, influenced by the ignorance of others, he had been5 disdainful of him. He thought that the books he had got from Amelius were corrupt because he did not understand the man’s usual form of expression. (Amelius’ copies of Plotinus had certainly been corrected by comparison with the autographs.)
To give a full picture of Longinus’ assessment of Plotinus, Amelius,10 and his other contemporaries, so that one can see what one of the best-known and leading critics thought of them, it is necessary to quote from his book. The book is called Longinus against Plotinus and Gentilianus15 Amelius: On the End, and this is the preface:
‘There have, Marcellus, been many philosophers in my time, not least in the early days of my youth. It is impossible to describe their20 rarity in this field now, but when I was still a boy there were quite a few outstanding philosophers – all of whom, it so happens, I got to see because from a very young age I travelled widely with my parents; and I got to know those who lived long enough by having a lot to do with their tribes and cities. Some of them tried to treat of their views in25 books, leaving to their successors something from which they could derive their help; but others thought it enough to lead their pupils to grasp them for themselves.
The first group includes the Platonists Euclides, Democritus, the30 Proclinus who spent time in the Troad and, among those still living in Rome, Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius his friend; the Stoics Themostocles and Phoebio, and Annius and Medius, who flourished35 until recently; and the Peripatetic Heliodorus of Alexandria. The second group includes the Platonists Ammonius and Origen, with whom we spent most of our time, men who were more than a little superior to their contemporaries in understanding, and the successors in Athens, Theodotus and Eubulus.40
There were things written by these men – Origen wrote On Daemons, and Eubulus On the Philebus and the Gorgias and Aristotle’s Criticisms of Plato’s Republic – but not enough to make them count as writers: it was an45 occasional activity for them, and not their principal interest. Stoics in this second group include Herminus and Lysimachus, and Athenaeus and Musonius, who lived in town; Peripatetics include Ammonius and Ptolemy, outstanding in their day as philologists, especially Ammonius50 (no one as learned as him was ever born). They didn’t write any technical manuals, but poems and epideictic speeches – and I don’t think any of those would have survived if it had been a matter of their own wishes, for they would not have been able to bear the idea of finding fame later55 on for books like this, when they had not gone to the trouble of preserving their views in more serious writings.
Among this group of writers, some wrote little more than compilations and transcriptions from the writings of their predecessors – so Euclides, Democritus, and Proclinus. Others tried to write on the same60 topics as the ancients, but focused on very minor aspects of their enquiries. They include Annius, Medius, and Phoebio – the latter preferring to be known for the words he used rather than the65 organization of his thought. One might place Heliodorus in their company too, because he added little to what his teachers had said, beyond correcting their language.
But there were others who manifested their eagerness to write,70 both in the number of questions which they tackled and their individual manner of thinking about them. They include Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius, whose account of what seemed to be Pythagorean and Platonic principles made for clearer exegesis than any of their predecessors. The writings of Numenius and Cronius and Moderatus and Thrasyllus could not touch those of75 Plotinus for clarity. Amelius chose to follow in his footsteps and held most of the same beliefs, but was his antithesis in the expansive way in which he worked through them and in the roundabout style of his expression.
These are the only people whose writings I think are worth80 considering. As to the rest: why should one be bothered with them at the expense of those works on which they rely, and to which they add nothing – not a single line of argument, let alone any substantive85 point. They simply collect the opinions of the majority, or the judgements of the superior. This is something I have said already elsewhere – for example, in answering Gentilianus on Plato’s view of justice, or in examining Plotinus’ On Ideas.26 Our mutual Tyrian90 friend Basileus, who has himself written a few works in the manner of Plotinus, for whom he left our school, wrote a work in which he tried to show that Plotinus held a better view about the ideas than the95 one I hold. I think I wrote a suitable response, showing the flaws in his decision to leave my school, and at the same time dispatching many views held by these men. Likewise in my letter to Amelius, which is the length of a monograph, and addresses everything that he wrote to me from Rome. He himself called this letter On the Manner of Plotinus’100 Philosophy, but I prefer to know it just by its common title: “Letter to Amelius”.’
§21. So, when he wrote this, he agreed that of all those active during his lifetime, Plotinus and Amelius most ‘manifested their eagerness to write, both in the number of questions which they tackled, and their individual manner of thinking about them’; that Plotinus did not pass off Numenius’ doctrines as his own, and that rather than having most5 regard for the doctrines of Numenius he actually pursued and took up the doctrines of the Pythagoreans; and that ‘the writings of Numenius and Cronius and Moderatus and Thrasyllus could not touch those of Plotinus for clarity’. Of Amelius he says he ‘chose to follow in his10 footsteps and held most of the same beliefs, but was his antithesis in the expansive way in which he worked through them and in the roundabout style of his expression’. He also mentions me, Porphyry, then still at the beginning of my attendance at Plotinus’ seminars. ‘Our mutual Tyrian friend Basileus,’ he says, ‘has himself written a few works in the15 manner of Plotinus.’ He wrote this because I was careful to avoid the unphilosophical prolixity of Amelius’ writings, and was keen to write in the style of Plotinus. What this great man, unsurpassed for his work as a critic and commentator, wrote about Plotinus is impressive enough; and20 he would have had nothing at all to say against him if I, Porphyry, had been able to go and see him when he asked me to and put him right about the doctrine of Plotinus.
§22. ‘But what is all this about oak and rock,’ as Hesiod says?27 If we are looking for witnesses from among the number of the wise, no one could be wiser than god, the god who said: ‘I know the number of the sand and5 the measure of the sea, and I understand the deaf and hear the dumb.’28 Amelius asked Apollo where the soul of Plotinus had gone – Apollo who simply said of Socrates: ‘Socrates is the wisest of all men.’29 Listen to10 what he said, and at what great length, about Plotinus:
‘The hymn I shall play is fit for the gods: its subject is a kindly friend; its tune a tapestry of honey-hues; it is played on a lyre with a golden pick.15 And I summon the Muses to join my song, to cry Iachae! with all their might and overwhelm with their music – as they did when summoned to start up the dance for Aiacides, with the frenzy of the gods and the songs of Homer. Muses come to the sacred dance! Together we’ll sing to the limits20 of song: you, and I surrounded by you: I, with my hair flowing, Phoebus.
Daemon, that were a man before, entering now a diviner rank: you became a daemon, when you loosed the chain of necessity that is the25 human being’s lot; and from the tempestuous waves of embodiment had strength to swim, to reach the headland’s shores, far from the shoals of the sinful. You set your foot on the sinuous path laid out for the pure in30 soul, where the light of the gods and their laws show the way, innocent of, rising above, the lawlessness of the sinful.
While twisting to flee the bitter waves, where blood sustains and whirlpools menace, mid-torrent, amid deafening confusion, the god-sent goal would often be made to seem near. Often the darts35 which your intellect fired were borne by their very strength along deviant paths: the gods then, shone focused rays of light which helped you to see from the gloomy shade, and raised you straight to the circling, the deathless path. The pleasure of sleep never wholly took40 hold of your eyes, the heavy bolt of its mist not allowed to seal your lids, so that, borne through the whirlpools, your eyes remained open to many and joyful things, things sought with difficulty by men who go after wisdom.
But now that you have struck your tent, and left the grave of a45 daemon-soul, you come among the assembly of daemons refreshed by the lovely breezes: where love is, where beautiful yearning is, full of pure joy, always replenished by deathless streams from god. From here50 come the reins of loves; from here the sweet breeze and calmness of aether. Here live the brothers of the golden generation of great Zeus: Minos and Rhadamanthus. Here lives the just Aeacus; here are Plato’s holy strength, and the beautiful Pythagoras, and those who started the55 dance of immortal love and won for themselves a common lineage with the most blessed daemons. Here the heart in good cheer is always60 warmed and cheerful. Oh blessed one, how many contests you have endured! Go now among holy daemons, your turbid lives the crest on your helmet.
Let us start the song, and the wheeling dance, for Plotinus, O Muses, who pleases us: no less for the blessed from my golden lyre!’
§23. These verses say that he was ‘kindly’: gentle, very kind, and charming, which we knew him to be. And they say that he did not sleep, kept his soul pure, and was always striving for the divine which he loved with5 his whole soul, and that he did everything to transform himself, to ‘flee the bitter waves’ of this life ‘where blood sustains’. So it is that this divine ‘daemon’ of a man ascended in his thought to the first, transcendent god many times, travelling the roads described by Plato10 in the Symposium;30 and to him appeared that god who has neither shape nor form, who has his seat above Intellect and every intelligible thing. (I, Porphyry, now 67 years old, once drew near this god and was unified with him.) Anyway, ‘the goal appeared near’ Plotinus: his aim or goal15 was to be unified and to be present to the god that is set over all things. This goal, an indescribable state of perfection, he achieved some four times while I was with him.
Because he was borne along ‘deviant’ paths, the gods often put him straight by sending ‘focused rays of light’: so one might consider what he20 wrote as written under their protection and supervision.
As Plotinus watched the world unseeingly, so his inner eye never slept, and this is why Apollo says ‘your eyes remained open to many and joyful things, things sought with difficulty’ by men who apply themselves to philosophy. Human contemplation can transcend the merely25 human, but when it is compared to the knowledge of the gods it is, graceful perhaps, but not able to plumb the depths as they do.
So much, then, for what the oracle shows about Plotinus’ actions and achievements while still in the body. After being freed from the body, it says that he came to the ‘assembly of daemons’, where ‘love’ and ‘yearning’30 are citizens, and that love which is kindled by god; as well as the so-called ‘soul judges’, those children of god, Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus. He passes before them, not to have judgement passed on him, but in order to join them in the company of all the other great men. Plato and35 Pythagoras are among the sort of people there, and others who started the dance of immortal love: and there the ‘most blessed of the daemons’ have their birth, and enter a life characterized by fulfilment and joy. They live out this life being made happy by the gods.40
§24. Such is our account of the life of Plotinus. He turned over to us the task of arranging and correcting his books, and I promised him while he was alive that I would do this, and gave undertakings to his other associates5 too. So I decided first of all not to leave his books as they were, in the chronological order of their publication. In this I followed the example of Apollodorus of Athens and Andronicus the Peripatetic: the former collected the works of Epicharmus the comic poet in ten volumes; the latter divided the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus into treatises, bringing10 related topics together. For my part, I hit on the pleasing idea of dividing the 54 books of Plotinus into six ‘enneads’ – groups of nine multiplied by the perfect number 6. I collected related topics together in each ennead,15 putting the less weighty questions first in the final order. The first ennead, then, contains the following treatises, dealing with more ethical matters. [Here follows a list of the titles and first lines of the treatises in Ennead 1]:35
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So the first ennead comprises these treatises, which embrace more ethical topics. The second is a collection of physics, embracing works concerned with the cosmos and things contained within the cosmos. They are the following [here follows a list of the titles and first lines of the treatises in Ennead 2]:
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The third ennead, which also deals with works on the cosmos, encompasses60 the following works, dealing with enquiries about the cosmos [here follows a list of the titles and first lines of the treatises in Ennead 3]:
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§25. These three enneads were put together and organized in one volume. We included On Our Allotted Daemon in the third ennead because it deals with matters concerning daemon in general, and the5 question is related to those he addresses concerning the birth of human beings. Similarly with On Love. On Eternity and Time we included here because time is a topic discussed here. On Nature, Contemplation, and the One is put here because of its treatment of ‘nature’, indicated by its title.
The fourth ennead follows the works on the cosmos with writings on10 the soul. It contains the following [Here follows a list of the titles and first lines of Ennead 4]:
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So the fourth ennead contains all these topics, which concern the soul itself. The fifth contains those dealing with the intellect, and includes all those books which deal with what lies beyond, with the intellect in the soul, and with the ideas. They are the following [here follows a list of the titles and first lines of Ennead 5]:
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§26. We put the fourth and fifth enneads together as a single volume. The final, sixth, ennead makes another volume, so that Plotinus’ works amount to three volumes, of which the first contains three enneads, the5 second two, the third one.
The contents of the third volume, which is the sixth ennead, are the following [here follows a list of the titles and first lines of Ennead 6]:
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This, then, is how we disposed Plotinus’ 54 books in six enneads. We30 set down notes for some of them – not systematically, but just as and when friends asked for something written down to help them understand a point.
We also wrote key-point summaries of all of the books (except On Beauty, which we did not possess), based on the chronological order of their publication. But it is not only the substantive points of each book35 that are included in this, but their lines of argument too, which are numbered in the same way as the summaries.
But now it is our task to go through each of the books with an eye to establishing punctuation and correcting any mistakes there might be in the language. The work itself will show what has been done.40
1 Porphyry tends to write of himself qua author of the Life in the first person plural, and qua actor in the first person singular.
2 The Greek suggests a contrast between these two clauses which is often missed: Plotinus only seemed embarrassed about the body. The point may be precisely to defend Plotinus from the charge that he despised the corporeal world (as a Gnostic, for example, might).
3 The phrase ἀπὸ στόματος is here often taken to mean that Plotinus greeted his friends ‘with a kiss’; but other attestations are always to do with delivering oneself orally (e.g. Pl., Euthyd. 276C); and the associated verb ἀποστοματίζειν regularly means ‘interrogate’ or ‘catechize’ (e.g. Luke 11:53).
4 See Pl., Phdr. 275E for the danger inherent in texts that they will take their arguments to people incapable of making good use of them.
5 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On the Motion of Heaven.’
6 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On Substance or on Body’.
7 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On the Substantiality of the Soul 2’.
8 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On Problems of the Soul 1’.
9 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On Problems of the Soul 2’.
10 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On Problems of the Soul 3’.
11 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is: ‘On Nature, Contemplation, and the One’.
12 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘That the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect, and on the One’.
13 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On Seeing, or on How it is That Distant Things Appear Small’.
14 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On the Voluntary and the One’s Wishing’.
15 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On What Evils are and Where They Come From’.
16 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On What is the Living Being and What is the Human Being’.
17 The title of the treatise in the body of the text is ‘On the Primary Good and the Other Goods’.
18 The name seems to be chosen partly for a pun between the Latin paulus and Greek μικρός (both meaning ‘small’). The name might suggest his hitting the ‘wrong note’ either through a further pun on the Greek μὴ καλῶς (‘not well [said]’), or perhaps in oblique reference to the musical Mikkalos who appears in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics (47b30ff.).
19 It may be relevant to note that in recounting the story of Atlantis, Plato tells us that Solon had intended to write such a poem, but never found the time. See Pl., Tim. 21C.
20 HS2 unnecessarily begin a new section at this point.
21 The details of this incident are variously rendered. For Plotinus’ custom of speaking ‘to texts’, cf. infra 14. For the relative difficulty of engaging with a text rather than a human interlocutor (the point with which this passage concludes in the translation), see Pl., Phdr. 275D.
22 The danger of slipping from one into the other is already remarked by Seneca, Ep. 108.35.
23 See Homer, Od. 8.282.
24 The origin of this quotation is unknown.
25 Probably a reference to 4.3–5 and 6.1–3.
26 Probably 6.7.
27 See Hesiod, Theog. 35.
28 See Herodotus, 1.47.
29 This line, also attested at D.L., 2.37, is in the chief ‘speaking’ metre of Greek tragedy, the iambic trimeter. Apollo’s normal medium, used in the response to Amelius, is the much grander dactylic hexameter.
30 See Pl., Symp. 210–211.