Maximus of Tyre c. 125 AD – c. 185 AD

Maximus of Tyre was a Greek Platonist philosopher of the Roman Empire who lectured at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere during the reign of Commodus. Forty-one of his short Dissertations or Dialexeis survive, treating in elegant rhetorical Greek a wide range of Platonic themes including the nature of the divine, the immortality of the soul, the use of the body, the tasks of philosophy, and the comparative merits of the active and contemplative lives. His doctrine that the same divine reality lies behind all true religions, and that statues and rites are aids to the imagination of the many, gives a humane Platonic defense of Greek philosophical religion in its last centuries.