On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books
Plotinos’s Books of the First Period (The Amelian Period)
I shall mention the books that Plotinos had already written at that time. As he had prefixed no titles to them, several persons gave them different ones. Here are those that have asserted themselves:
1. Of the Beautiful. i. 6.
2. Of the Immortality of the Soul. iv. 7.
3. Of Fate. iii. 1.
4. Of the Nature of the Soul. iv. 1.
5. Of Intelligence, of Ideas, and of Existence. v. 9.
6. Of the Descent of the Soul into the Body. iv. 8.
7. How does that which is Posterior to the First
Proceed from Him? Of the One. v. 4.
8. Do all the Souls form but a Single Soul? iv. 9.
9. Of the Good, or of the One. vi. 9.
10. Of the Three Principal Hypostatic Forms of
Existence, v. 1.
11. Of Generation, and of the Order of Things after the First, v. 2.
12. (Of the Two) Matters, (the Sensible and
Intelligible). ii. 4.
13. Various Considerations, iii. 9.
14. Of the (Circular) Motion of the Heavens. ii. 2.
15. Of the Daemon Allotted to Us, iii. 4.
16. Of (Reasonable) Suicide, i. 9.
17. Of Quality, ii. 6.
18. Are there Ideas of Individuals? v. 7.
19. Of Virtues. i. 2.
20. Of Dialectics. i. 3.
21. (How does the Soul keep the Mean between
Indivisible Nature and Divisible Nature?) iv. 2.
These twenty-one books were already written when I visited Plotinos; he was then in the fifty-ninth year of his age.
V. HOW PORPHYRY CAME TO PLOTINOS FOR THE SECOND TIME (A. D. 263–269).
I remained with him this year, and the five following ones. I had already visited Rome ten years previously; but at that time Plotinos spent his summers in vacation, and contented himself with instructing his visitors orally.
During the above-mentioned six years, as several questions had been cleared up in the lectures of Plotinos, and at the urgent request of Amelius and myself that he write them down, he wrote two books to prove that