Ammonius Saccas arose, and started things again; and left a successor who was able to carry them forward almost to the point where Pythagoras left them.  For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned.  He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis.  Things were well in hand; the emperor and empress were enthusiastic:—­as your Gallieneuses will be, for quarter of an hour at a time, over any high project.  But certain of his ministers were against it; and he wobbled; and delayed; and thought of something else; and hung fire; and presently was killed.  And Claudius, the first of the Illyrian emperors, who succeeded him, was much to busy defeating the Goths to come to Rome even,—­much less could he pay attention to spiritual projects.  Two years later Plotinus died, in 270;—­and the chance was not to come again for more than sixteen centuries.

But Neo-Platonism was not done with yet, by any means.  Plotinus left a successor in his disciple Porphyry, born at Tyre or at Batanea in Syria in 233.  You see they were all West Asians, at least by birth:  the first spiritual fruits of the Crest-Wave’s influx there.  Porphyry’s name was originally Malchus (the Arabic Malek, meaning king); but as a king was a wearer of the purple, someone changed it for him to Porphyry or ‘Purple.’  In 262 he went to Rome to study under Plotinus, and was with him for six years; then his health broke down, and he retired to Sicily to recover.  In 273 he returned,—­Plotinus had died three years before, and opened a Neo-Platonic School of his own.  He taught through the last quarter of that century, while the Illyrian emperors were smashing back invaders on the frontiers or upstart emperors in the provinces.  Without imperial support, no Platonopolis could have been founded; and there was no time for any of those Illyrians to think of such things.—­even if they had had it in them to do so, as they had not:—­witness Aurelian’s execution of Longinus.  The time had gone by for that highest of all victories:  as it might have gone by in our own day, but for events in Chicago, in February, 1898.  When Porphyry died in 304, he left a successor indeed; but now one that did not concern himself with Rome.

It was Iamblichus, born in the Lebanon region; we do not know in what year; or much about him at all, beyond that he was an aristocrat, and well-to-do; and that he conducted his Theosophic activities mainly from his native city of Chalcis. he died between 330 and 333; thus through thirteen decades, from the beginning of the third century, these four great Neo-Platonist Adepts were teaching Theosophy in the Roman world;—­Ammonius in Egypt; Plotinus and Porphyry,—­the arm of the Movement stretched westward to save, if saved they might be, the Roman west Europe, —­in Rome itself; then, since that was not be done, Iamblichus