Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at W.W.

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Today's episode, The Platonic Successor Proclis.

In Athens at the foot of the Acropolis lies an archaeological site that was discovered at the

end of the 19th century.

It was a villa from late Antiquity near the holy sites of Dionysius and the healing

God Asclepius.

The ruins contain, among other things, a statue of the goddess ISIS and the remains of a sacrificed

piglet. In the 1950s it was suggested that the site could be none other than

the house of Proclas.

Born in Constantinople in the year 412 AD,

Proclas came to Athens, distinguished himself

as a great philosopher and practitioner of pagan ritual and ultimately became head of the platonic school.

He was thus known as the platonic successor, one of the last thinkers in the golden chain that expounded and defended Platonism in late

antique Athens.

Just as you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, apparently you can't forge new links in a golden chain

without slaughtering a few piglets.

We know more about Proclos than we have any right to.

Thanks to a surviving biography of the great man by Proclis's own successor

Marinus. Marinus' life of Proclis is more hegemony than biography, a portrait of not just a philosopher but a sage, a man of deep piety and uncompromising

virtue, or rather virtues.

Morinus organizes the story of Proclus's life in accordance with the levels of virtue

...