Porphyry, one of the principal founders of Neoplatonism, was born of Syrian parents at Tyre. He studied philosophy at Athens. In 263 he went to Rome, joined the group that regarded Plotinus as its master, and, apparently some years after Plotinus's death, took over his school. He died some time in the first six years of the fourth century.

Porphyry can be called a founder of Neoplatonism because, while the philosophy he upheld was in the main that of Plotinus, he made it possible for this philosophy to become, as it did, an institution throughout the Roman Empire. He arranged Plotinus's lectures for publication in their present form; he defended and developed their content in independent works of his own; third, he enabled some of the much more systematic, not to say more teachable, philosophy of Aristotle to be included even by Platonic...