CHAPTER
IV
PLOTINUS AND HIS NEAREST PREDECESSORS
A NAME once customarily but incorrectly applied to the Neowas "the School of Alexandria." The historians who used the name were aware that it was not strictly correct, and now it seems to be again passing out of use. That the Neo-Platonic teachers were not in any close association with the scientific specialists and literary critics of the Alexandrian Museum was elaborately demonstrated by Matter in a work which is really a History of the School or rather Schools of Alexandria, and not, like those of Vacherot and Platonist school
—
—
Simon bearing the Same general title, of Neo-Platonism. In his third volume (1848) Matter devotes a special section to the Neo-Platonic philosophy, "falsely called Alexandrian," and there he treats it as representing a mode of thought
Jules
Museum. an exaggeration. Of the obscure antipathy which he thinks existed, he does not bring any tangible evidence; and, in fact, when Neo-Platonism had become the philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world, it was received at Alexandria as elsewhere. What is to be avoided is merely the
secretly antipathetic to the scientific spirit of the
This, however,
is
ascription of a peculiar local association that did not exist.
To the Jewish Platonism of Philo and to the Christian Platonism of Clement and Origen the name of "Alexandrian" may be correctly applied for it was at Alexandria that both types of thought were elaborated. To the Hellenic Platonism ;
of Plotinus
and
his school it has
no proper application. Plo-
tinus indeed received his philosophical training at Alexandria
under Ammonius Saccas; but it was not till long after, at Rome, that he began to put forth a system of his own. After his death, knowledge of his system, through Porphyry and lambhchus, diffused itself over all parts of the Roman Empire where there was any care for philosophy. Handed on by the successors of lamblichus, the doctrine of Plotinus at last