But your judgement has persuaded me that we should profit by this occasion firstly to provide ourselves with a useful memorandum of the doctrines that have won our adhesion, and secondly to bring about a more complete knowledge of the system — long celebrated though it be — to the glory of our friend, a man so great as Plotinus.
Hence I now bring you the promised Reply, executed, as you your- self know, in three days. You must judge it with reasonable indulgence ; this is no orderly and elaborate defence composed in step by step corre- spondence with the written indictment : I have simply set down, as they occurred to me, my recollections of our frequent discussions. You will admit, also, that it is by no means easy to grasp the meaning of a writer who, like Plotinus, now arraigned for the opinion we also hold, varies in the terms he uses to express the one idea.
If I have falsified any essential of the doctrine, I trust to your good nature to set me right : I am reminded of the phrase in the tragedy ; A busy man and far from the teachings of our master I must needs correct and recant. Judge how much I wish to give you pleasure. Good health.
This letter seemed worth insertion as showing, not merely that some contemporary judgement pronounced Plotinus to be parading on the strength of Numenius’ ideas, but that he was even despised as a word- spinner.
The fact is that these people did not understand his teaching : he was entirely free from all the inflated pomp of the professor : his lectures had the air of conversation, and he never forced upon his hearers the severely logical substructure of his thesis.
I myself, when I first heard him, had the same experience. It led me to combat his doctrine in a paper in which I tried to show that The Intelligibles exist outside of the Intellectual-Principle. He had my work read to him by Amelius : at the end he smiled and said: “You must clear up these difficulties, Amelius : Porphyry doesn’t understand our position.” Amelius wrote a tract of considerable length, “ In Answer to Porphyry’s Objections ” ; I wrote a reply to the reply : Amelius replied to my reply ; at my third attempt I came, though even so with difficulty, to grasp the doctrine : then only, I was converted, wrote a recantation and read it before the circle. From that time on I put faith in Plotinus’ writings and sought to stir in the master himself the ambition of organising his doctrine and setting it down in more extended form. Amelius, too, under my prompting, was encouraged in composition.
Longinus’ estimate of Plotinus, formed largely upon indications I myself had given him in my letters, will be gathered from the following extract from one of his to me. He is asking me to leave Sicily and join him in Phoenicia, and to bring Plotinus’ works with me. He says :
“ And send them at your convenience or, better, bring them ; for I can never cease urging you to give the road towards us the preference over any other. If there is no better reason — and what intellectual gain can you anticipate from a visit to us ? — at least there are old acquaint- ances and the mild climate which would do you good in the weak state of health you report. Whatever else you may be expecting, do not hope for anything new of my own, or even for the earlier works which you tell me you have lost ; for there is a sad dearth of copyists here. I assure you it has taken me all this time to complete my set of Plotinus, and it was done only by calling oh my scribe from all his routine work, and keeping him steadily to this one task.
I think that now, with what you have sent me, I have everything, though in a very imperfect state, for the manuscript is exceeding faulty.
I had expected our friend Amelius to correct the scribal errors, but he evidently had something better to do. The copies are quite useless to me ; I have been especially eager to examine the treatises on the Soul and on The Authentic-Existent, and these are precisely the most corrupted. It would be a great satisfaction to me if you would send me faithful transcripts for collation and return — though again I suggest to you not to send but to come in person, bringing me the correct copies of these treatises and of any that Amelius may have passed over. All that have reached me I have been careful to make my own ; how could I be content not to possess myself of all the writings of a man so worthy of the deepest veneration ?
I repeat, what I have often said in your presence and in your absence, as on that occasion when you were at Tyre, that while much of the theory does not convince me, yet I am filled with admiration and delight over the general character of the work, the massive thinking of the man, the philosophic handling of problems ; in my judgement investi- gators must class Plotinus’ work with that holding the very highest rank.”
This extended quotation from the most acute of the critics of our day — a writer who has passed judgement on nearly all his contemporaries — serves to show the estimate he came to set upon Plotinus of whom, at first, misled by ignorant talk, he had held a poor opinion.
His notion, by the way, that the transcripts Amelius sent him were faulty sprang from his misunderstanding of Plotinus’ style and phrase- ology ; if there were ever any accurate copies, these were they, faithful reproductions from the author’s own manuscript.
Another passage from a work of Longinus, dealing with Amelius, Plotinus and other metaphysicians of the day, must be inserted here to give a complete view of the opinion formed upon these philosophers by the most authoritative and most searching of critics. The work was
entitled On the End: in Answer to Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius. It opens with the following preface :
In our time, Marcellus, there have been many philosophers — especially in our youth — for there is a strange scarcity at present. When I was a boy, my parents’ long journeys gave me the opportunity of seeing all the better-known teachers ; and in later life those that still lived became known to me as my visits to this and that city and people brought me where they happened to live.
Some of these undertook the labour of developing their theories in formal works and so have bequeathed to the future the means of profit- ing by their services. Others thought they had done enough when they had convinced their own immediate hearers of the truth of their theories.
First of those that have written.
Among the Platonists there are Euclides, Democritus, Proclinus the philosopher of the Troad, and the two who still profess philosophy at Rome, Plotinus and his friend Gentilianus Amelius. Among the Stoics there are Themistocles and Phoibion and the two who flourished only a little while ago, Annius and Medius. And there is the Peripatetic, Heliodorus of Alexandria.
For those that have not written, there are among the Platonists Ammonius and Origen, two teachers whose lectures I myself attended during a long period, men greatly surpassing their contemporaries in mental power ; and there are the Platonic Successors at Athens, Theodorus and Eubulus.
No doubt some writing of a metaphysical order stands to the credit of this group : Origen wrote on Spirit-Beings ; Eubulus commented on both the Philebus and Gorgias, and examined the objections urged by Aristotle to Plato’s Republic ; but this is not enough to class either of them with systematic authors. This was side-play ; authorship was not in the main plan of their careers.
Among Stoic teachers that refrained from writing we have Herminus and Lysimachus, and the two living at Athens, Musonius and Athenaeus ; among Peripatetics, Ammonius and Ptolemaeus.
The two last were the most accomphshed scholars of their time, Ammonius especially being unapproached in breadth of learning ; but neither produced any systematic work ; we have from them merely verses and duty-speeches ; and these I cannot think to have been preserved with their consent ; they did not concern themselves about formal statement of their doctrine, and it is not likely they would wish to be known in after times by compositions of so trivial a nature.
To return to the writers ; some of them, like Euclides, Democritus and Proclinus, confined themselves to the mere compilation and tran- scription of passages from earlier authorities. Others diligently worked over various minor points in the investigations of the ancients, and put together books dealing with the same subjects. Such were Annius, Medius and Phoibion, the last especially choosing to be distinguished for style rather than for systematic thinking. In the same class must be ranked Heliodorus ; his writings contribute nothing to the organisation of the thought which he found to his hand in the teaching of earlier workers.
Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius alone display the true spirit of authorship ; they treat of a great number of questions and they bring a method of their own to the treatment.
Plotinus, it would seem, set the principles of Pythagoras and of Plato in a clearer light than anyone before him ; on the same subjects, Numenius, Cronius, Moderatus and Thrasyllus fall far short of him in precision and fulness. Amelius set himself to walk in Plotinus’ steps and adopted most of Plotinus’ opinions ; his method, however, was diffuse and, unlike his friend, he indulges in an extravagance of explanation.
Only these two seem to me worth study. What profit can anyone expect from troubling the works of any of the others to the neglect of the originals on which they drew ? Content with setting side by side the most generally adopted theories and marking off the better from the worse, they bring us nothing of their own, not even a novel argument, much less a leading idea.
My own method has been different ; as for example when I repHed to Gentilianus upon Plato’s treatment of Justice and in a review I under-
took of Plotinus’ theory of the Idea. This latter was in the form of a reply to Basileus of Tyre, my friend as theirs. He had preferred Plotinus’ system to mine and had written several works in the manner of his master, amongst them a treatise supporting Plotinus’ theory of the Idea against that which I taught. I endeavoured, not, I think, unsuccess- fully, to show that his change of mind was mistaken.
In these two essays I have ranged widely over the doctrines of this school, as also in my Letter to Amelius which, despite the simple title with which I contented myself, has the dimensions of a book, being a reply to a treatise he addressed to me from Rome under the title “ On Plotinus’ Philosophic Method.”
This Preface leaves no doubt of Longinus’ final verdict : he ranks Plotinus and Amelius above all authors of his time in the multitude of questions they discuss ; he credits them with an original method of investigation : in his judgement they by no means took their system from Numenius or gave a first place to his opinions, but followed the Pythagorean and Platonic schools ; finally he declares the writings of Numenius, Cronius, Moderatus and Thrasyllus greatly inferior in pre- cision and fulness to those of Plotinus.
Notice, by the way, that while Amelius is described as following in Plotinus’ footsteps, it is indicated that his temperamental prohxity led him to delight in an extravagance of explanation foreign to his master : in the reference to myself, though I was then only at the beginning of my association with Plotinus — “ Basileus of Tyre, my friend as theirs, who has written a good deal, has taken Plotinus as his model ” — Longinus recognises that I entirely avoided Amelius’ unphilosophical prohxity and made Plotinus’ manner my standard.
Such a pronouncement upon the value of Plotinus’ work, coming from so great an authority, the first of critics then as now, must certainly carry weight, and I may remark that if I had been able to confer with him, during such a visit as he proposed, he would not have written to combat doctrines which he had not thoroughly penetrated.
But why talk, to use Hesiod’s phrase, “ About Oak and Rock ” ? If we are to accept the evidence of the wise — who could be wiser than a God ? And here the witness is the same God that said with truth :
“ I have numbered the sands and taken the measure of the
sea ; I understand the dumb and hear where there has been no
speech.”