Plotinus and the Neoplatonic Theory of Beauty

Plotinus (204/5-270 CE), the founder of what modern scholarship calls Neoplatonism, taught in Rome from around 245 CE onward. According to his student Porphyry's biographical preface, the Life of Plotinus, Plotinus wrote nothing before the age of forty-nine and left, at his death, fifty-four treatises, which Porphyry edited and arranged, around 301 CE, into six groups of nine treatises each, hence the collection's traditional title, the Enneads (from the Greek ennea, nine). Porphyry reports that Plotinus's very first written treatise was I.6, "On Beauty" (Peri tou Kalou), and Plotinus returns to the theme at length in the later treatise V.8, "On Intelligible Beauty," together forming the core texts of ancient Neoplatonic aesthetics.