• Born in Tyre in the province in Syria in 234 C.E.
• He then made his way to Rome, where, at around the age of thirty, he joined Plotinus’s circle. After Plotinus’s death, he would go on to become one of the most influen tial figures in later Platonism. Besides authoring numerous works on ethics, physics, and religion, he was responsible for the standard edi tion of Plotinus’s Enneads and would exert an influence on both pagan and Christian philosophers for centuries to come. Despite his age (he was in his late sixties at the opening of the new century), Porphyry married Marcella, a widowed Roman matron with several children.
• Porphyry was traveling at or around the same time that Diocletian and Galerius were holding their persecution conferences of 302-3. The Christian Lactantius, who had been appointed Diocletian’s court rhetorician, reports hearing presentations by two anti-Christian polemi cists during this period. 6 One was Hi erodes, a judge and dabbler in re ligion and philosophy whose polemics against Christianity consisted of attempts to “reveal the falsity of scripture,” with a special emphasis on an unfavorable comparison of Jesus with the holy man Apollonius of Tyana.

Porphyry says we shouldn’t eat animals.

Porphyry’s commentaries on Homer are some of the earliest and best-preserved examples of figurative readings of Greek poetry and myth:

Porphyry’s attack on the Christians (Against the Christians):

Porphyry also attacked Christianity in his Philosophy from Oracles:

The Date and Attribution of Porphyry’s Anti-Christian Fragments (early 300s):

(Porphyry, Lactantius’s Unnamed Polemicist, and the Great Persecution) The evidence that supports a close connection between Porphyry’s anti Christian polemics and the policies of Diocletian and Galerius as well as the identification of Lactantius’s unnamed polemicist with Porphyry has been addressed at several places in the main text: