Plotinus: works in Greek and English

The road of the text

Follow the text from Plotinus's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like ¹ are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Ancient tradition / legend This is what ancient writers told; it may not be what happened. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

The author
Copies
Readers
Print and editions

c. AD 205The authorBorn in Egypt, in 204 or 205; Eunapius gives his home town as Lyco^1,4,5
about 30 years laterc. AD 232The authorIn his twenty-eighth year, turns to philosophy at Alexandria and finds his teacher, Ammonius^2,3
about 11 years laterAD 243The authorJoins Gordian III's campaign against Persia^2,4
about 1 years laterc. AD 244The authorSettles in Rome, at forty (late 244, or 245)^1,2,4 Debated among scholars
about 10 years laterc. AD 254The authorBegins to write, at about fifty, some ten years after reaching Rome^2,4
about 9 years laterAD 263The authorPorphyry joins him in Rome; twenty-one treatises are already written^1,4,7
5 years laterAD 268The authorPorphyry leaves for Sicily^4,7
2 years laterAD 270The authorDies in Campania, at sixty-six^2,4
about 30 years laterc. AD 301CopiesPorphyry publishes the Enneads, with his Life of Plotinus⁷
about 16 years laterc. AD 317ReadersEusebius quotes treatises IV.7 and V.1 in his Preparation for the Gospel (written 312–322)⁶
about 80 years laterc. AD 400ReadersEunapius: Plotinus' books are read more than Plato's dialogues^5,6
about 450 years laterc. AD 850ReadersThe Arabic Theology of Aristotle, drawn from Enneads IV–VI (the ninth century)²⁰
about 640 years later1492Print and editionsFicino's Latin translation is printed at Florence^1,22
88 years later1580Print and editionsFirst printed Greek text, by Pietro Perna at Basel, with Ficino's Latin^8,25
about 260 years later1835Print and editionsCreuzer's edition, at Oxford⁴
48 years later1883Print and editionsVolkmann's Teubner edition, the Greek text in the reader (1883–84)¹⁸
68 years later1951Print and editionsHenry and Schwyzer's editio maior begins to appear (1951–73)^2,30
13 years later1964Print and editionsTheir Oxford text, the editio minor, begins to appear (1964–82)^2,24,26
2 years later1966Print and editionsArmstrong's Loeb edition and translation begins to appear (1966–88)^8,31,32
52 years later2018Print and editionsGerson's complete English translation (Cambridge)^1,2

Life and work

Checked against sources · 6 October 2026

Plotinus (Πλωτῖνος) lived from 204 or 205 to 270 AD, and he is generally regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism.¹ The word is a modern one, coined in the early nineteenth century; Plotinus himself thought he was simply a Platonist, an interpreter and defender of Plato.¹ Nearly all we know of his life comes from the Life of Plotinus that his pupil Porphyry wrote as the preface to his edition of the master's works.²

A philosopher ashamed of his body

Porphyry's first sentence is famous. Plotinus, he says, “seemed ashamed of being in the body” (ἐῴκει μὲν αἰσχυνομένῳ, ὅτι ἐν σώματι εἴη).^3,4 He would never talk about his family or his homeland, and he refused to sit for a painter: “Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?” Why leave posterity “an image of the image”?⁴ Porphyry worked out the year of his birth by counting back sixty-six years from his death, to the thirteenth year of the emperor Severus: 204 or 205 by our reckoning.^1,4 He was a native of Egypt.² The historian Eunapius, writing in the early years of the fifth century, adds the name of his town: “Lyco they call it”.^5,6

He came late to philosophy. In his twenty-eighth year he turned to it at Alexandria,^2,3 but came back from the lectures of the famous teachers there sad and discouraged.^3,4 A friend took him to Ammonius, known as Ammonius Saccas, and after one lecture Plotinus said τοῦτον ἐζήτουν: “This was the man I was looking for.” He stayed with Ammonius for eleven years.^2,3,4 Then, in 243, he joined the emperor Gordian III's campaign against Persia, eager, Porphyry says, “to investigate the Persian methods and the system adopted among the Indians”.^2,4 Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus escaped to Antioch with difficulty.⁴ At forty he settled in Rome: late in 244 by one modern account, in 245 by another.^1,2,4

A school in Rome

At his meetings in Rome, passages from recent commentaries on Plato and Aristotle were read aloud and discussed, and then Plotinus gave his own answer.² For ten years he wrote nothing. He began to write at about fifty, and when Porphyry joined him in 263 he had written twenty-one treatises.^1,2,4 Porphyry stayed some five years (six, as he counts them),^2,4,7 until Plotinus saw that he was thinking of killing himself and sent him away to Sicily, in 268.^4,7 Dying friends left their children in Plotinus' care, and in twenty-six years in Rome he never made an enemy.⁴ He asked the emperor Gallienus to rebuild a ruined town in Campania that had once, people said, been a city of philosophers; it would be called Platonopolis and live under Plato's laws. Jealousy at court stopped the plan.⁴

Illness ended his teaching: his voice grew hoarse, his sight dim, and his friends began to avoid him. He withdrew to a dead friend's estate in Campania and died there in 270, with only his doctor and pupil Eustochius beside him.^2,4,8 As Eustochius later told Porphyry, his last words were, in Stephen MacKenna's translation: “I have been a long time waiting for you; I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”^4,8 The Greek behind them has been called one of the most controversial passages in later Greek literature (see Where editors disagree).⁸

The One, Intellect and Soul

Plotinus' world has three basic realities: the One (or the Good), Intellect and Soul. A treatise of the Fifth Ennead is called On the Three Principal Hypostases, that is, the three basic realities.^1,9 The One is the absolutely simple first principle and the cause of the being of everything else. It cannot be described directly, and it is beyond thinking, since thinking needs a thinker and something thought.¹ «Πάντα τὰ ὄντα τῷ ἑνί ἐστιν ὄντα», “All beings are beings by the One” (our translation).¹⁰ Intellect (νοῦς) comes next: eternal thought, holding the Forms, Plato's unchanging patterns of things. Soul is desire for what lies outside oneself: everything with a soul, from a human being to a plant, reaches for something it lacks, such as food, and the outward work of Soul is nature.¹ Talk of things flowing out of the One describes how each level depends on the one above it, not a process in time.¹

The human soul belongs up there too, and has forgotten it. The treatise on the three hypostases opens: «Τί ποτε ἄρα ἐστὶ τὸ πεποιηκὸς τὰς ψυχὰς πατρὸς θεοῦ ἐπιλαθέσθαι», “What is it, then, that has made souls forget their father, God?” (our translation).⁹ Philosophy is the way back, and Plotinus writes of it from experience: «Πολλάκις ἐγειρόμενος εἰς ἐμαυτὸν ἐκ τοῦ σώματος», “Often, waking up out of the body into myself” (our translation), begins his treatise on the soul's descent into bodies.¹¹ Porphyry says that while he was with him Plotinus four times reached union with the God above all things.⁴ The treatise On the Good, or the One ends by calling the life of gods and godlike men «φυγὴ μόνου πρὸς μόνον», “a flight of the alone to the alone” (our translation).^10,12 Elsewhere the advice is two words: «ἄφελε πάντα», “Take away everything” (our translation).¹³

On Beauty

On Beauty (Ennead I.6) is the first treatise in Porphyry's list of the works in the order Plotinus wrote them.^1,14 It starts from what everyone knows: «Τὸ καλόν ἐστι μὲν ἐν ὄψει πλεῖστον», “Beauty is found mostly in what we see” (our translation), but also in words and music, ways of life and deeds.¹⁵ All beauty, Plotinus argues, is form, an image of the Forms in Intellect; we respond even to the dim beauty of bodies because we half recognise its model.¹ So the lover of beauty must turn inward: «φεύγωμεν δὴ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα», “Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland”, like Odysseus leaving Circe and Calypso, but not on foot or by ship.^4,16 The work is done on oneself, as a sculptor works on a statue: «μὴ παύσῃ τεκταίνων τὸ σὸν ἄγαλμα», “never cease chiselling your statue”.^4,17 For «οὐ γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἶδεν ὀφθαλμὸς ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος», “Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike”.^4,17

Reading Plotinus

His Greek is hard, and Porphyry explains why. Plotinus worked a treatise out in his head and wrote it down in one go, “as though he were copying from a book”; his eyes were weak, so he never read it over, and he cared nothing for spelling.⁴ In Porphyry's words, “In style Plotinus is concise, dense with thought, terse, more lavish of ideas than of words”.⁴ He seldom names the recent writers he draws on, he expects his readers to catch allusions to Plato and Aristotle, and his treatises often move by association, and sometimes read like an inner monologue or a live dialogue with an unnamed interlocutor.² The Greek in the reader is Richard Volkmann's edition (Leipzig, 1883–84), the text MacKenna translated; the reader has no English translation of the Enneads.^4,18

Stories about him

Ancient tradition / legend Porphyry tells stories that read like the life of a holy man. An Egyptian priest offered to call up Plotinus' guardian spirit in the temple of Isis at Rome; what appeared, the priest cried, was not a lesser spirit but a god.⁴ When Amelius asked him to come to the rites of the new moon, Plotinus answered: “It is for those Beings to come to me, not for me to go to them.”⁴ At the moment of his death, Eustochius said, a snake crept under his bed and slipped away into a hole in the wall; in Greek tradition a snake could stand for the soul leaving the body.^4,8

After Plotinus

Porphyry published the treatises in about 301, in six sets of nine, the Enneads (from ἐννέα, “nine”), with the Life as their preface.^4,7,14 Eunapius, given to exaggeration but not without ground, claimed that Plotinus' “books are in the hands of educated men, more so than the dialogues of Plato”.^5,6 Christians read him too: Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, copied long passages into his Preparation for the Gospel,⁶ and Augustine of Hippo knew the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry intimately.¹⁹ In the ninth century parts of Enneads IV–VI were translated into Arabic, and under the title Theology of Aristotle they carried his ideas through the Arabic-speaking world.²⁰ In the formative periods of Christian, Muslim and Jewish theology, he was the main source for their understanding of Platonism.¹ In western Europe his works came back with Marsilio Ficino's Latin translation, the first full one, printed at Florence in 1492.^1,21,22 Lloyd Gerson traces his influence through the humanists Colet, Erasmus and More, the Cambridge Platonists and Hegel.¹

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Porphyry's edition. Plotinus had asked Porphyry to revise and arrange his writings.⁴ Porphyry decided to set aside the order in which they were written and to group them by subject, as Andronicus had done for Aristotle: fifty-four treatises in six sets of nine, starting with the easiest, on ethics, and rising to the One in the Sixth Ennead. He grouped them in three sections: Enneads I–III, IV–V and VI.^2,4 To reach fifty-four he split some writings and joined others.^1,14 He also gave a list of the treatises in the order Plotinus wrote them (Life 4–6), and some recent editors follow that order instead; his own arrangement has often been criticised as artificial.²

Eustochius. A note in the margin at Ennead IV.4.29, kept in manuscripts of three of the main families, says that in the copies of Eustochius, Plotinus' doctor, the second book On the Soul ended at this point and the third began, while in Porphyry's the text runs on.^6,23 Whether Eustochius produced a whole edition of his own is unclear: Gerson thinks there perhaps was one, now lost without trace.¹ Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé argues that the long passages quoted by Eusebius, which some scholars took as evidence for it, come from Porphyry's edition.⁶

Manuscripts. The Byzantine manuscripts all go back to one lost copy, their archetype. Goulet-Cazé holds that it belonged to a group of philosophical manuscripts copied at Constantinople, known as the “Philosophical Collection”.⁶ The Arabic version is a separate witness, made from a Greek text older than that archetype; with Eusebius' quotations it helps to restore the lost pages of IV.7.^6,20 Paul Henry began his search for the manuscripts in 1932, at the age of twenty-six; he and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer then worked side by side in Schwyzer's house in Zürich for four months each summer over nearly thirty years, with Henry's photocopies of the ten major manuscripts at hand.²⁴

Print. Ficino's Latin translation, with his commentary, was printed by Antonio Miscomini at Florence on 7 May 1492.²² The Greek text was first printed in 1580, at Basel, by Pietro Perna, with Ficino's Latin.^8,25 Creuzer's three-volume edition appeared at Oxford in 1835, and Richard Volkmann's Teubner text, the one in the reader, at Leipzig in 1883–84.^4,18 Until Henry and Schwyzer there was no reliable Greek text.²⁴ Their editio maior (1951–73) gives a full account of the manuscript readings, and their Oxford text, the editio minor (1964–82), is the standard edition.^2,24,26

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

Debated among scholars The last words. Volkmann's text has φήσας πειρᾶσθαι τὸ ἐν ἡμῖν θεῖον ἀνάγειν πρὸς τὸ ἐν τῷ παντὶ θεῖον: “saying that he was trying to bring the divine in us back up to the divine in the All” (our translation).³ That is how MacKenna takes it, and from the Renaissance until 1953 every edition but one printed this reading.^4,8 But some manuscripts note in the margin another reading, τὸν ἐν ὑμῖν θεόν, “the god in you” (our translation), and the one exception, Pietro Perna's first edition of 1580, had printed it. In 1953 Paul Henry adopted it and read the infinitive as a command, so that Plotinus' last words become advice: try to bring the god in you back to the divine in the All. The Oxford text of 1964 prints this, and Armstrong translated it. Others have kept the old reading, or argued about whom the advice was for: all his pupils, Eustochius alone, or all humanity.⁸

Debated among scholars A gap filled by a bishop. In every manuscript of the Enneads the treatise On the Immortality of the Soul (IV.7) breaks off in chapter 8 after the words «σωφροσύνη καὶ δικαιοσύνη» and runs straight on into words that make no sense after them. The Greek of the missing pages survives only because Eusebius quoted them in his Preparation for the Gospel, and most of them are also reflected in the Arabic Theology of Aristotle; modern editions print them as the end of chapter 8 and chapters 8¹–8⁵.^6,20 A few manuscripts later patched part of the gap from Eusebius.⁶ The reader's text, Volkmann's, prints the whole passage inside one very long chapter 8.²⁷ Paul Henry thought Eusebius had used a different ancient edition, perhaps Eustochius'; Goulet-Cazé, following Kraus and Schwyzer, argues that the passage was lost by an accident in the copying of Porphyry's edition.⁶

Where one treatise ends. The note about Eustochius at IV.4.29 shows two editions dividing the books on the soul differently: in Eustochius' copies the third book began at what is now chapter 30, while in Porphyry's, chapters 30–45 still belong to IV.4.^6,23 IV.3 and IV.4 themselves were one treatise, which Porphyry cut in two in the middle of a sentence.⁶

One treatise in four. Harder showed in 1936 that four treatises written one after another, numbers 30 to 33 in Porphyry's list (III.8, V.8, V.5 and II.9), were once a single great treatise against the Gnostics, which Porphyry divided among three Enneads.^6,14

One letter. In IV.4.28 in a passage on anger and the body, the text has «θηρία πρὸς τὰς κράσεις», with the word κράσεις, “blendings”.^28,29 Schwyzer proposed changing one letter, to βράσεις, “boilings”. He told Armstrong he would not be angry if Armstrong preferred the text of the French editor Bréhier, and Armstrong did, with a long and apologetic footnote.^24,29

Books to read it in

R. Volkmann, Plotini Enneades, praemisso Porphyrii De vita Plotini deque ordine librorum eius libello, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883–84).^3,18 The Greek text in the reader, without Porphyry's Life. MacKenna translated from it.⁴
P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, Plotini Opera, 3 vols (Brussels and Paris, 1951–73), the editio maior.^2,30 The full record of the manuscript readings.
P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, Plotini Opera, 3 vols (Oxford Classical Texts, 1964–82), the editio minor.^2,24,26 The standard critical text.
A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus, 7 vols (Loeb Classical Library 440–445 and 468, Harvard University Press, 1966–88).^8,31,32 Greek and English on facing pages; the first volume has Porphyry's Life and Ennead I.
L. P. Gerson (ed.), Plotinus: The Enneads, translated by G. Boys-Stones, J. M. Dillon, L. P. Gerson, R. A. King, A. Smith and J. Wilberding (Cambridge University Press, 2018).^1,2 The most recent complete English translation, without the Greek.
Stephen MacKenna, English translation of the Enneads, made from Volkmann's text; its first volume, The Ethical Treatises, has Porphyry's Life and Ennead I.⁴ The classic English version, quoted in this article; B. S. Page later revised it,²⁴ and John Dillon edited an abridged version (Penguin, 1991).¹
P. Kalligas, The Enneads of Plotinus: A Commentary, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 2014) and vol. 2 (2023).² A running commentary, first published in Greek by the Academy of Athens.

Where this comes from

Sources (32)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 6 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

Plotinus

The work