Encyclopedia of Philosophy: NEO-PLATONISM

Contemporary with Origen, and a fellow pupil of Ammonius Saccas, was the last great pagan philosopher, Plotinus (205–70). Plotinus was an admirer of Plato, but gave his philosophy such a novel cast that he is known not as a Platonist, but as the founder of Neo-Platonism. After a brief military career he settled in Rome, toying with the idea of founding, with imperial support, a Platonic Republic in Campania. His works were edited after his death, in six groups of nine treatises (Enneads), by his disciple and biographer Porphyry. Written in a taut and difficult style, they cover a wide variety of philosophical topics: ethics and aesthetics, physics and cosmology, psychology, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology.