Porphyry 234 AD – 305 AD

Porphyry of Tyre was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the most important pupil of Plotinus. He edited and arranged his teacher's writings into the Enneads, prefacing them with the Life of Plotinus, our principal source for the founder of Neoplatonism. His Isagoge, an introduction to Aristotle's Categories, dominated logical instruction in late antiquity, the Islamic world, and the Latin West for more than a thousand years. He also wrote a celebrated polemic Against the Christians, of which only fragments survive.

Porphyry was born in 234 AD at Tyre in Phoenicia, where his original name was Malchus, 'king'; the Greek name Porphyry, with its echo of royal purple, was given him by his teachers. After studies with the rhetor Longinus at Athens he traveled to Rome around 263 AD and attached himself to Plotinus, with whom he remained for five years as the most able and devoted of the disciples. Plotinus entrusted to him the editing and arrangement of his fifty-four treatises.

After Plotinus's death in 270 AD Porphyry retired to Sicily, returned to Rome, and finally taught and wrote into his old age. His works include the Life of Plotinus and the edition of the Enneads, the Isagoge or Introduction to Aristotle's Categories that became the standard medieval logic primer, the philosophical letter Ad Marcellam to his wife, On Abstinence from Animal Food, the Sentences leading to the Intelligibles, and the polemical Against the Christians in fifteen books, of which only fragments survive.

Porphyry made Plotinus's Neoplatonism transmissible: his edition fixed the form in which the Enneads have been read for more than seventeen centuries, his Isagoge framed the medieval discussion of universals, and his vegetarianism and theology of contemplation shaped the later Platonic schools and medieval Christian and Islamic thought. He died at Rome around 305 AD.