Plotinus

Almost all we know of Plotinus comes from the Life written by his pupil Porphyry. Porphyry begins with a famous remark: Plotinus seemed ashamed of being in a body, and he would never speak of his family or his birthplace. When a pupil asked him to sit for a portrait, he refused, asking whether it was not enough to carry the image nature had given him without leaving behind an image of an image. The painter Carterius, Porphyry says, made a likeness anyway, from memory, after watching him teach.

Plotinus was not a Stoic. He saw himself as an interpreter of Plato, though he drew on Aristotle and the Stoics as well, and from his teaching grew Neoplatonism, the last great school of pagan philosophy. In his later years he wrote fifty-four treatises, which Porphyry arranged into six groups of nine, the Enneads. They describe a single source of all reality, the One, from which mind and soul flow outward and to which the soul can return in contemplation.

Porphyry says he asked Gallienus for a ruined city in Campania to rebuild as Platonopolis, a city governed by Plato's laws, but the plan came to nothing. He died in Campania in AD 270.