Abstract

In chapters twenty and twenty-one of his Life of Plotinus Porphyry identifies Thrasyllus as the first of four Neopythagorean forerunners of Plotinus, the others being Moderatus, Cronius, and Numenius. That means that Thrasyllus was recognized by Porphyry as the earliest representative of one of the strands of the Plotinian philosophical synthesis. More widely--and Tarrant is concerned with the wider theme throughout his book--we must learn to recognize Thrasyllus as one of those to whom we must look if we are to understand more of the shift in the last century B.C. and the first century of the Christian era from the empiricism and anti-transcendentalism of Hellenistic philosophy, with its predominantly epistemological emphases, to the restored theories of transcendentalist Platonism which dominated the final centuries of ancient thought.