Life of Proclus

Written by Marinus, successor to Proclus as head of the Athenian school, this short life — subtitled On Happiness — is our chief source for the master’s career, and a rare portrait of a late-antique philosopher from within his own circle.

Marinus arranges the life as an ascent through the grades of virtue — natural, ethical, political, purificatory, theoretic, and at last the theurgic and divine — so that the biography becomes itself a Neoplatonic argument: that Proclus had climbed the whole ladder of the soul. It preserves vivid details of his piety, his theurgic practice, and his visions.