Plotinus refused to sit for a portrait because bodies were mere copies
Plotinus distrusted the physical world so thoroughly that he would not let anyone paint him and never spoke of his birthplace or childhood. From Rome he taught that everything flows from a single, indescribable One, like light from the Sun, and founded the tradition later called Neoplatonism.
His pupil Porphyry reckoned he was born around 204 or 205 AD and died at 66 in 270. A later writer placed his birth at Lyco in Egypt, prompting guesses about Egyptian, Greek or Roman roots, but the safe claim is that Greek was his language and education. He came to philosophy late, at 28, in Alexandria. No teacher satisfied him until a friend took him to hear the self-taught Platonist Ammonius Saccas, and Plotinus declared he had found the man he was looking for. He stayed eleven years.
Hoping to learn from Persian and Indian thinkers, he joined Emperor Gordian III's campaign against Persia in 242 to 243. It failed, Gordian died, and Plotinus struggled back to Antioch. At about forty he settled in Rome, where his circle included senators, doctors, and women such as Gemina, in whose house he lived. He won the respect of Emperor Gallienus and proposed a City of Philosophers in Campania governed by Plato's Laws, but the funds never came.
From around 253 he wrote the essays Porphyry later arranged as the Enneads, groups of nine. Weak eyesight stopped Plotinus from revising, his handwriting was dreadful and he ran words together, so Porphyry did the editing. The core teaching is a ladder of being. At the top is the One, beyond being and non-being, identified with the Good and with Beauty. From it emanates Intellect, then Soul, then individual souls and finally matter, without the One being diminished, as the Sun loses nothing by shining.
The One could also be experienced directly, in a union where seer and seen merge; Porphyry says his teacher reached it four times in the years he knew him. Plotinus held that true happiness lies within consciousness, beyond the reach of fortune. His ideas shaped pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic and early Islamic mystics. His reported last words urged his friends to raise the divine within them to the divine in the all.
Source: Plotinus
