We carve great thinkers into marble and put their faces on money. Plotinus refused to let anyone paint his portrait and would not discuss his childhood, viewing the human body as a cheap copy of a higher reality. This episode follows the third-century philosopher from obscure origins in Roman Egypt through a disastrous military invasion to his rise as a reluctant author whose messy, typo-filled notes became the philosophical backbone of Western mysticism.

We cover his late start in philosophy at 28, his eleven years with the self-taught Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, and his decision to join Emperor Gordian III’s campaign against Persia in search of Eastern wisdom, a venture that ended with the emperor dead and Plotinus stranded. We then follow him to Rome, where he taught senators, doctors, and women, pitched a city of philosophers called Platonopolis to Emperor Gallienus, and left behind notes his student Porphyry edited into the Enneads. We close with the One, emanation, and his influence on Augustine, Al-Kindi, Avicenna, and the Renaissance.

• Why a dogmatic Alexandrian education left him depressed and what Ammonius taught him about synthesizing Plato and Aristotle
• How surviving a collapsed military campaign reset his life and sent him to the heart of the empire
• Why a man who distrusted matter still wanted to build a physical utopia
• The Wi-Fi router analogy for emanation, and how evil as an absence of good solved an ancient theological headache
• His painful final illness, the snake at his deathbed, and his last instruction to elevate the divine within