Now the intellectual fashion was for Neoplatonism, a development from Plato’s thought which emphasized its religious character. The greatest Neoplatonist teacher was Plotinus (c. 205–70). Accounts of him include what seems the first recognizable description in Western history of acute dyslexia, which probably explains why he was a reluctant writer; his inspirational oral teachings were mediated to a rapidly growing circle of admiring intellectuals through his somewhat self-important biographer and editor Porphyry, who published Plotinus’s works at the beginning of the fourth century.34
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