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Origins and Early Life
Plotinus, born as Plotinos around 204, is generally believed to have come from Egypt. Ancient testimony preserves his deliberate silence about family, birthplace, and early years; later traditions link him to a city in Egypt, but the evidence is uncertain. What can be said with confidence is that he emerged from the Hellenistic educational world of the eastern Mediterranean and that he set himself the lifelong task of understanding and living the philosophical life in a manner he associated with Plato.

Philosophical Formation in Alexandria
At about the age of twenty-eight, Plotinus moved to Alexandria and committed himself to philosophy. There he found the teacher who shaped him most decisively, Ammonius Saccas. Plotinus studied with Ammonius for eleven years, in a period of close discipleship that Porphyry, his later student and biographer, described as foundational. Other students of Ammonius known to have been active around the same time included Herennius and a Platonist named Origen. Plotinus came to regard Ammonius as the model of a life devoted to contemplation, and he absorbed the habit of returning to Plato with rigorous interpretive discipline while engaging Aristotle and the Stoics as interlocutors rather than antagonists.

Journey East and Flight West
Eager to test his understanding against the wisdom traditions associated with Persia and India, Plotinus joined the campaign of the Roman emperor Gordian III against the Sasanian Empire in 243. The expedition collapsed; Gordian died, and Plotinus barely escaped with his life, making his way to Antioch. From there he went to Rome, probably in 244 or 245, where he would teach and write for the remainder of his life.

Rome and the Teaching Circle
In Rome Plotinus gathered a sustained circle of students and friends. Among the most important were Porphyry, who would later edit and arrange Plotinus's writings; Amelius (Gentilianus Amelius), a devoted and prolific disciple; and Eustochius, a physician from Alexandria who attended Plotinus in his final days. Others around him included the literary critic Zoticus, the senator Castricius Firmus, and Rogatianus, a magistrate who moved away from public honors under the influence of Plotinus's counsel. Plotinus's reputation reached the imperial court: Emperor Gallienus and Empress Salonina received him, and he proposed to them a plan to found a city ruled by philosophical laws in the spirit of Plato's Republic. The project, remembered as a plan for a Platonopolis, won interest but was not realized.

Writing and the Enneads
Plotinus did not write during his years with Ammonius and resisted publication in Rome for some time. Around the age of forty-nine he began composing treatises, often in response to questions raised in seminars. Over roughly a decade and a half he produced fifty-four treatises. After Plotinus's death, Porphyry collected, edited, and arranged these into six groups of nine treatises each, the Enneads, and prefaced them with a Life of Plotinus that remains the chief source for his biography. Amelius preserved notes and wrote in defense of the master's doctrines, and Eustochius transmitted details of his final period. The collaborative labor of this circle shaped the transmission of Plotinus's thought.

Philosophical Vision
Plotinus's philosophy centers on a hierarchical vision of reality articulated in three principal hypostases: the One (the Good), Intellect (Nous), and Soul. The One is beyond being and thought, the source from which all reality proceeds without diminution. From the One emanates Intellect, the locus of the Forms; from Intellect proceeds Soul, which orders the cosmos and is present in individual souls. The sensible world is an image of higher realities, not to be despised but to be read as a reflection of intelligible order. The human task is purification and ascent: through ethical discipline, intellectual contemplation, and a turning inward, the soul may return to its source, culminating, on rare occasions, in union beyond discursive thought. Porphyry reports that Plotinus experienced such union multiple times. Plotinus wrote sharply against those he called Gnostics, defending the beauty and order of the cosmos and rejecting any contempt for the material world as a divine image. He engaged Plato and Aristotle continuously, borrowing analytic tools while insisting on the primacy of the Good and the transformative aim of philosophy.

Style, Character, and Daily Life
Accounts by Porphyry and others depict Plotinus as austere and generous. He took no fee for teaching, lived frugally, and spent considerable energy as guardian for orphans entrusted to him, managing estates conscientiously. He discouraged attention to his body and refused to sit for a painter or sculptor, explaining that it was enough to carry the image nature had given. His seminars were searching and dialogical, with Amelius defending, Porphyry questioning, and visitors testing positions; the critic Longinus, though not a member of the circle, assessed Plotinus's style from afar and judged it powerful yet demanding. Plotinus cared more for clarity of thought than for rhetorical polish, and he pressed students to move from argument to conversion of life.

Relations with Power
Plotinus's circle brought him into contact with leading Roman figures. The patronage and attention of Gallienus and Salonina testify to his standing in the capital during a turbulent imperial era. The failure of the proposed city of philosophers is emblematic of his cautious nearness to political life: he advised and imagined reforms but did not seek office. His influence was exerted through counsel, example, and the quiet transformation of those who came to listen.

Final Years and Death
In his later years Plotinus's health declined, and Porphyry, troubled in spirit, left Rome at Plotinus's urging for Sicily. Eustochius remained with the master and later reported details of the last months. Plotinus withdrew to Campania, where he died around 270. According to Eustochius, his final counsel urged the soul's return to the divine. After his death, Porphyry completed the editorial work that would give the Enneads their enduring form, relying in part on materials shared by Amelius and others from the circle.

Legacy
Plotinus stands as the principal architect of what later came to be called Neoplatonism. His synthesis of Platonic metaphysics, ethical purification, and the practice of contemplation became a point of departure for Porphyry and subsequent thinkers, and his criticisms of Gnostic cosmology shaped debates within late antique philosophy. Through students and readers, his work influenced pagan, Christian, and later philosophical traditions. Yet his own life, as portrayed by those nearest him, remained anchored in a disciplined search for the Good, a teacher among friends whose shared labor preserved a body of thought that continues to define one of antiquity's most profound visions of reality.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Plotinus, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - God.

Other people realated to Plotinus: William Ralph Inge (Clergyman), Dean Inge (Philosopher), Marsilio Ficino (Philosopher)