ABSTRACT
In the latest study of the relation between Plotinus and the Gnostics, Jean-Marc Narbonne observes that over the course of a roughly twenty- ve-year teaching career in Rome beginning during the years 244-6 and ending abruptly in 269, Plotinus developed a number of positions re ecting confrontations with a multitude of issues. is career was marked by several decisive events and many quarrels, among which the battle with the Gnostics certainly took precedence.2 Indeed, Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus tells us that a number of gnostic apocalypses circulated in his Roman seminar, principally treatises of the so-called Sethian or “classical” Gnostics, especially the Nag Hammadi treatises Zostrianos and Allogenes. According to Porphyry, Plotinus himself was said to have refuted these treatises many times in his courses, even going so far as to write his own critique in
Enn. II.9[33] and mandating even more thoroughgoing refutations of them by his principal disciples, Amelius and Porphyry, during the years 263-8, but the con ict continued until the demise of the seminar in 269, since some of those close to Plotinus – whom he called “friends” – had fallen under the spell of the rival doctrine and were defecting (Enn. II.9[33].10.3-6). From his rst days in Rome, Plotinus was surrounded not so much by scholastic Platonists, but by Platonizing Gnostics whom he considered for some time to be his friends (Narbonne 2011: 68-9). is suggests that he regarded them as belonging to the same group as did he and his disciples, namely to the partisans of “Plato’s Mysteries” (Puech 1960: 182-3).
