Plotinus

Plotinus was an Egyptian who studied philosophy in Alexandria, followed the emperor’s army to Persia to learn the wisdom of the East, and taught in Rome for twenty-five years, where senators and the emperor Gallienus attended his lectures and he hoped to found a city of philosophers. He wrote nothing until he was fifty; his student Porphyry arranged the treatises into six groups of nine, the Enneads. They teach that all things proceed from the One, through Intellect and Soul, and return to it, and that the philosopher may in this life ascend to union with it, which Plotinus said he achieved four times. Augustine, Dante and the Renaissance drew from him.