At twenty he was caught by the passion for philosophy : he was directed to the most highly reputed professors to be found at Alexandria ; but he used to come from their lectures saddened and discouraged. A friend to whom he opened his heart divined his temperamental craving and suggested Ammonius, whom he had not yet tried. Plotinus went, heard a lecture, and exclaimed to his comrade : “ This was the man I was looking for.”

From that day he followed Ammonius continuously, and under his guidance made such progress in philosophy that he became eager to investigate the Persian methods and the system adopted among the Indians. It happened that the Emperor Gordian was at that time preparing his campaign against Persia ; Plotinus joined the army and went on the expedition. He was then thirty-nine, for he had passed eleven entire years under Ammonius. When Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia, it was only with great difficulty that Plotinus came off safe to Antioch.

At forty, in the reign of Philip, he settled in Rome.

Erennius, Origen and Plotinus had made a compact not to disclose any of the doctrines which Ammonius had revealed to them. Plotinus kept faith, and in all his intercourse with his associates divulged nothing of Ammonius’ system. But the compact was broken, first by Erennius and then by Origen following suit : Origen, it is true, put in writing nothing but the treatise On the Spirit-Beings, and in Galienus’ reign that entitled The King the Sole Creator. Plotinus himself remained a

long time without writing, but he began to base his Conferences on what he had gathered from his studies under Ammonius. In this way, writing nothing but constantly conferring with a certain group of associates, he passed ten years.

He used to encourage his hearers to put questions, a liberty which, as Amelius told me, led to a great deal of wandering and futile talk.

Amelius had entered the circle in the third year of Philip’s reign, the third, too, of Plotinus’ residence in Rome, and remained about him until the first year of Claudius, twenty-four years in all. He had come to Plotinus after an efficient training under Lysimachus : in laborious diligence he surpassed all his associates ; for example, he transcribed and arranged nearly all the works of Numenius, and was not far from having most of them off by heart. He also took notes of the Conferences and wrote them out in something like a hundred treatises which he has since presented to Hostilianus of Apamea, his adopted son.

I myself arrived from Greece in the tenth year of Galienus’ reign, accompanied by Antonius of Rhodes, and found Amelius an eighteen- years’ associate of Plotinus, but still lacking the courage to write any- thing except for the notebooks, which had not reached their century. Plotinus, in this tenth year of Galienus, was about fifty-nine : when I first met him I was thirty.

From about the first year of Galienus Plotinus had begun to write upon such subjects as had arisen at the Conferences : when I first came to know him in this tenth year of the reign he had composed twenty- one treatises.

These I procured though they were by no means given about freely. In fact the distribution was grudging and secret ; those that obtained them had passed the strictest scrutiny.

Plotinus had given no titles to these treatises; everybody headed them for himself : I cite them here under the titles which finally pre- vailed, quoting the first words of each to facilitate identification.*

* These first words are of course omitted and the Ennead reference is added.

1. On Beauty (I. 6).

2. On the Immortality of the Soul (IV. 7).

3. On Fate (III. i).

4. On the Essence of the Soul (IV. i).

5. On the Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic- Existent (V. 9).

6. On the Descent of the Soul into the Body (IV. 8).

7. On the Emanation of the Non-Primal from the Primal-Being ; and on The One (V. 4).

8. Whether all the Souls constitute One Soul (IV. 9).

9. On the Good or the One (VI. 9).

10. On the Three First Hypostases (V. i).

11. On the Generation and Order of the Post-Primals (V. 2).

12. On the Two Orders of Matter (II. 4).

13. Diverse Questions (HI. 9).

14. On the Circular Movement (II. 2).

15. On our Tutelary Spirit (II. 2).

16. On the Reasoned Dismissal (I. 9).

17. On Quality (II. 6).

18. Whether there exist Ideas of Particulars (V. 7).

19. On the Virtues (I. 2).

20. On Dialectic (I. 3).

21. Why the Soul is described as Intermediate between the Existent having parts and the undisparted Existent (IV. i).

These are the twenty-one treatises which, as I have said, Plotinus had already written, by his fifty-ninth year, when I first came to him.

I had been, it is true, in Rome a little before this tenth year of Galienus, but at that time Plotinus was taking a summer holiday, engag- ing merely in conversation with his friends. After coming to know him I passed six years in close relation with him. Many questions were threshed out in the Conferences of those six years and, under persuasion from Amelius and myself, he composed two treatises to establish : —

22, 23. That the Authentic-Existent is universally an integral, self- identical Unity (II. 4, 5).

In immediate succession to these he composed two more : one is entitled ; —

24. On the Absence of the Intellectual-Act in the Transcendental ; and on What Existent has the Intellectual-Act Primarily and What Existent has the Intellectual- Act Secondarily (V. 6) ;

The other deals with —

25. Existence, Potential and Actual (II. 5).

After these come the following twenty : —

26. On the Impassibility of the Bodiless (III. 5).

27. On the Soul, First (IV. 3).

28. On the Soul, Second (IV. 4).

29. On the Soul, Third ; or. How We See (IV. 5).

30. On Contemplation (III. 8).

31. On the Intellectual-Beauty (V. 8).

32. That the Intelligibles are Not Outside of the Intellectual- Principle and On the Good (V. 5).

33. Against the Gnostics (II. 9).

34. On Numbers (VI. 6).

35. Why Distant Objects Appear Small (II. 8).

36. Whether Happiness depends upon Extension of Time (I. 5).

37. On Coalescence (II. 7).

38. How the Multitude of Ideas came into Being ; and on the Good

(VI. 7).

39. On Free-Will (VI. 8).

40. On the World (II. i).

41. On Sensation and Memory (IV. 6).

42. On the Kinds of Being, First (VI. i).

43. On the Kinds of Being, Second (VI. 2).

44. On the Kinds of Being, Third (VI. 3).

45. On Eternity and Time (III. 7).

Thus we have twenty-four treatises composed during the six years of my association with him and dealing, as the titles indicate, with such problems as happened to arise at the Conferences ; add the twenty-one composed before my arrival, and we have accounted for forty-five treatises.

The following five more Plotinus wrote and sent to me while I was living in Sicily, where I had gone about the fifteenth year of Galienus : —

46. On Happiness (I. 4).

47. On Providence, First (III. 2).

48. On Providence, Second (III. 3).

49. On the Conscious Hypostases and the Transcendental (V. 3).

50. On Love (III. 5).

These five he sent me in the first year of Claudius : in the early months of the second year, shortly before his death, I received the following four : —

51. On Evil (I. 8).

52. Whether the Star’s have Causal Operation (II. 3).

53. On the Animate and the Man (I. i).

54. On the First Good ; or. On Happiness (I. 8).

Adding these nine to the forty-five of the first and second sets we have a total of fifty-four treatises.

According to the time of writing — early manhood, vigorous prime, worn-out constitution — so the tractates vary in power. The first twenty- one pieces manifest a slighter capacity, the talent being not yet matured to the fulness of nervous strength. The twenty-four produced in the mid-period display the utmost reach of the powers and, except for the short treatises among them, attain the highest perfection. The last nine were written when the mental strength was already waning, and of these the last four show less vigour even than the five preceding.

Plotinus had a large following. Notable among the more zealous students, really devoted to philosophy, was Amelius of Tuscany, whose family name was Gentilianus. Amelius preferred to call himself Amerius, changing L for R, because, as he explained, it suited him better to be named from Amereia, Unification, than from Ameleia, Indifference.

The group included also one Paulinus, a doctor of ScythopoUs, whom Amelius used to call Mikkalos in allusion to his blundering habit of mind.

Among closer personal friends was Eustochius of Alexandria, also a doctor, who came to know Plotinus towards the end of his life, and attended him until his death : Eustochius consecrated himself exclusively to Plotinus’ system and became a veritable philosopher.

Then there was Zoticus, at once critic and poet, who has amended the text of Antimachus’ works and is the author of an exquisite poem upon the Atlantis story : his sight failed, and he died a little before Plotinus, as also did Paulinus.

Another friend was Zethos, an Arabian by descent, who married a daughter of Ammonius’ friend Theodosius. Zethos, too, was a doctor ; Plotinus was deeply attached to him and was always trying to divert him from the political career in which he stood high. Plotinus was on the most familiar terms with him, and used to stay with him at his country place, six miles from Mintumae, a property which had formerly belonged to Castricius Firmus.

Castricius was excelled by none of the group in appreciation of the finer side of life : he venerated Plotinus ; he devoted himself in the most faithful comradeship to Amelius in every need, and was in all matters as loyal to myself as though I were his own brother.

This was another example of a politician venerating the philosopher. There were also among Plotinus' hearers not a few members of the Senate, amongst whom Marcellus Orontius and Sabinillus showed the greatest assiduity in philosophical studies.

Another Senator, Rogatianus, advanced to such detachment from political ambitions that he gave up all his property, dismissed all his

slaves, renounced every dignity, and, on the point of taking up his praetorship, the lictors already at the door, refused to come out or to have anything to do with the office. He even abandoned his own house, spending his time here and there at his friends' and acquaintances’, sleeping and eating with them and taking, at that, only one meal a day. He had been a victim of gout, carried in a chair, but this new regime of abstinence and abnegation restored his health : he had been unable to stretch out his hands ; he came to use them as freely as men living by manual labour. Plotinus took a great liking to Rogatianus and frequently praised him very highly, holding him up as a model to those aiming at the philosophical life.

Then there was Serapion, an Alexandrian, who began life as a professional orator and later took to the study of philosophy, but was never able to conquer the vices of avarice and usury.

I myself. Porphyry of Tyre, was one of Plotinus’ very closest friends, and it was to me he entrusted the task of revising his writings.

Such revision was necessary : Plotinus could not bear to go back on his work even for one re-reading ; and indeed the condition of his sight would scarcely allow it : his handwriting was slovenly ; he mis- joined his words ; he cared nothing about spelling ; his one concern was for the idea : in these habits, to our general surprise, he remained unchanged to the very end.

He used to work out his design mentally from first to last : when he came to set down his ideas ; he wrote out at one jet all he had stored in mind as though he were copying from a book.

Interrupted, perhaps, by someone entering on business, he never lost hold of his plan ; he was able to meet all the demands of the con- versation and still keep his own train of thought clearly before him ; when he was free again, he never looked over what he had previously written — his sight, it has been mentioned, did not allow of such re- reading— but he linked on what was to follow as if no distraction had occurred.