Porphyry, one of the greatest Neoplatonist philosophers, was born at Tyre, or at Batanea, in the year 233 A.D. His original name was Malchus (Heb. Melch, 'king'); and Porphyrius ('one clad in purple') is but a kind of playful synonym for this royal name. He is said by Socrates the historian and by St Augustine to have been originally a Christian; but this seems improbable, although it is certain that in his youth he was a hearer of Origen, or at least held some intercourse with him at Cæsarea in Palestine. What is more certain is that he passed at a later time to Athens, where he studied rhetoric under Longinus, the well-known author of the treatise On the Sublime. It was at Rome, however, whither he repaired about 263, that he found the master who permanently moulded his life. Here he became the most trusted of the disciples of the Neoplatonist
Plotinus. After a few years in Rome he went to Sicily, where, if St Jerome's account is to be relied on, he wrote his once celebrated treatise in fifteen books against the Christians, now known only from the replies—themselves lost—which it elicited from Methodius of Tyre, Eusebius of Cæsarea, and Apollinaris of Laodicea. His book itself was burned by order of the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian in 448. He then returned to Rome, and taught there, where he is said to have died, probably about 303. His own most famous pupil was Iamblicus. For a view of Porphyry's position in the history of the Neoplatonic school, see NEOPLATONISM. He was a very voluminous writer, and, though no very profound thinker, a learned, capable, earnest, and high-minded man. His philosophy keeps close to life and practical duties, its object the salvation of the soul, to be effected by the extinction of impure desires through strict asceticism together with knowledge of God. He was a determined opponent of Christianity, and in his trenchant criticism exposed many of its supposed errors and imperfections.
Of his writings the chief are the Lives of Plotinus and Pythagoras; Sententiae; De Abstinentia; and the Epistola ad Marcellam, addressed to his wife. There is a complete list in Fabricius' Bibliotheca Græca, v., ed. Harless. See the works on the Alexandrian school by Vacherot and Jules Simon, and Zeller's Philos. der Griechen, vol. ii.; also the monograph by Bouillet (Paris, 1864).