Porphyry of Tyre

Porphyry is the Phoenician-born Neoplatonic philosopher to whom the tradition owes the received text of Plotinus. Born Malchus and given the Greek name Porphyrios, he came to Rome in 263 CE and spent six years with Plotinus before retiring to Sicily under the weight of melancholia — a withdrawal that Plotinus’s own letter, reproduced in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, cut short with a characteristic diagnosis: “You are not ill, but your retirement is not good for you.”

After Plotinus’s death, Porphyry edited the master’s disordered drafts into the Enneads — six groups of nine treatises each, arranged thematically — and wrote the Life of Plotinus as their preface, a document that remains the principal source for what little is known of Plotinus’s biography and for the character of his school. Porphyry’s own works — On Abstinence from Animal Food, the Isagoge (which became the standard introduction to Aristotelian logic in both the Arabic and Latin worlds), On the Cave of the Nymphs, Letter to Marcella — established many of the philosophical habits that the later Neoplatonic, Arabic, and Christian traditions inherited. See plotinus and enneads.

Relationships

• plotinus
• enneads
• ammonius-saccas