Proclus

, an eminent philosopher among the later Platonists, was born at Constantinople in the year 410, of | parents who were both able and willing to provide for his instruction in all the various branches of learning and knowledge. He was first sent to Xanthus, a city of Lycia, to learn grammar; thence to Alexandria, where he was under the best masters in rhetoric, philosophy, and mathematics; and from Alexandria he removed to Athens, where he heard Plutarch, the son of Nestorius, and Syrianus, both of them celebrated philosophers. He succeeded the last in the rectorship of the Platonic school at Athens, where he died in the year 485. Marinus of Naples, who was his successor in the school, wrote his life and the first perfect copy of it was published, with a Latin version and notes, by Fabricius, Hamburgh, 1700, 4to, and afterwards subjoined to his “Bibiiotheca Latina, 1703,” 8vo.

He wrote a vast number of works in various ways; many of which are lost, some are published, and a few remain still in manuscript only. Of the published, there are four very elegant hymns; one to the “Sun,” two to “Venus,” and one to the “Muses,” of all which Godfrey Olearius, and Grotius, wrote Latin versions. There are “Commentaries upon several pieces of Plato,” upon the four books of Claudius Ptolemoeus “Dejudiciis Astrorum,” upon the first book of “Euclid’s Elements,” and upon Hesiod’s “Opera & Dies.” There are also works of Proclus upon philosophical and astronomical subjects particularly the piece “De Sphsera,” which was published in 1620, 4to, by Bainbridge, the Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. Lastly, we may mention his “Argumenta XVIII. adversus Christianos” which, though the learned Cave supposed them to be lost, are still extant. Cave, concluding too much from the title of this piece, and from what Suidas says of Proclus, was led to rank him with Celsus, Julian, Porphyry, as a professed and bitter adversary of Christianity whereas Proclus only attacks the Christians upon this single dogma, “whether the world be eternal” the affirmative of which he attempts to prove against them by eighteen arguments. Joannes Philopon us refuted these arguments of Proclus, with eighteen arguments for the negative: and both the one and the other, for they are interwoven, have been printed more than once with Latin versions.

The character of Proclus is that of all the later Platonists, who were in truth much greater enthusiasts than the Christians their contemporaries, whom they represented in | this light. Proclus was not reckoned quite orthodox by his order he did not adhere so religiously, as Julian and Porphyry, to the doctrines and principles of his master “he had,” says Cudwortb, “some peculiar fancies and whimsies of his own, and was indeed a confounder of the Platonic theology, and a rningler of much unintelligible stuff with it.” ¹