On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books
The School of Ammonius
Herennius, (the pagan) Origen, and Plotinos had agreed to keep secret the teachings they had received from Ammonius. Plotinos carried out his agreement. Herennius was the first one to break it, and Origen followed his example. The latter limited himself to writing a book entitled, “Of Daemons;” and, under the reign of Gallienus, he wrote another one to prove that “The Emperor alone is the Only Poet” (if the book was a flattery; which is not likely. Therefore it probably meant: “The King (of the universe, that is, the divine Intelligence), is the only ‘demiurgic’ Creator.”)
For a long period Plotinos did not write anything. He contented himself with teaching orally what he had learned from Ammonius. He thus passed ten whole years teaching a few pupils, without committing anything to writing. However, as he allowed his pupils to question him, it often happened that his school was disorderly, and that there were useless discussions, as I later heard from Amelius.
Amelius enrolled himself among the pupils of Plotinos during the third year of Plotinos’s stay in Rome, which also was the third year of the reign of Claudius II, that is, 24 years. Amelius originally had been a disciple of the Stoic philosopher Lysimachus. Amelius surpassed all his fellow-pupils by his systematic methods of study. He had copied, gathered, and almost knew by heart all the works of Numenius. He composed a hundred copy-books of notes taken at the courses of Plotinos, and he gave them as a present to his adopted son, Hostilianus Hesychius, of Apamea. (Fragments of Amelius’s writings are found scattered in those of Proclus, Stobaeus, Olympiodorus, Damascius, and many of the Church Fathers.)
IV. HOW PORPHYRY CAME TO PLOTINOS FOR THE FIRST TIME, IN 253.
In the tenth year of the reign of Gallienus, I (then being twenty years of age), left Greece and went to Rome with Antonius of Rhodes. I found there Amelius, who had been following the courses of Plotinos for eighteen years. He had not yet dared to write anything, except a few books of notes, of which there were not yet as many as a hundred. In this tenth year of the reign of Gallienus, Plotinos was fifty-nine years old. When I (for the second, and more important time) joined him, I was thirty years of age. During the first year of Gallienus, Plotinos began to write upon some topics of passing interest, and in the tenth year of Gallienus, when I visited him for the first time, he had written twenty-one books, which had been circulated only among a very small number of friends. They were not given out freely, and it was not easy to go through them. They were communicated to students only under precautionary measures, and after the judgment of those who received them had been carefully tested.