The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

your own phrase, pestered by the persistent assertion that our friend's doctrine is to be traced to Numenius of Apamea.

Now, if it were merely for those illustrious personages who spread this charge, you may be very sure I would never utter a word in reply. It is sufficiently clear that they are actuated solely by that famous and astonishing facility of speech of theirs when they assert, at one moment, that he is an idle babbler, next that he is a plagiarist, and finally that he bases the universe on the meanest of existents. Clearly in all this we have nothing but scoffing and abuse.

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 yourself know, in three days. You must judge it with reasonable indulgence ; this is no orderly and elaborate defence composed in step by step correspondence 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.

i8.

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 wordspinner.

PORPHYRY

p. 17

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.

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.

19.

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 acquaintances 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.

i8

PLOTINUS

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.

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 investigators must class Plotinus’ work with that holding the very highest rank.”

20.

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 phraseology ; 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

PORPHYRY

p. 19

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 profiting by their services.