The Neoplatonic school was founded in Rome by Plotinus (ca. 205–ca. 270 CE), who was probably born in the East, during the high point of the imperial crisis of the third century, which apparently did not have as deleterious an effect on Greek as on Latin literature. Plotinus’s most important student, Porphyrios (d. 305), continued to live in Rome. After that, the history of Neoplatonism, and of philosophy as a whole, shows a clear split between a fairly large number of philosophers who lived in the East (in Athens, Asia Minor, Syria, and perhaps Alexandria) and wrote in Greek and those who
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