The fact is that these people did not understand his teaching: he was entirely free from all the inflated pomp of the professor: his lectures had the air of conversation, and he never forced upon his hearers the severely logical substructure of his thesis.
I myself, when I first heard him, had the same experience. It led me to combat his doctrine in a paper in which I tried to show that The Intelligibles exist outside of the Intellectual-Principle. He had my work read to him by Amelius: at the end he smiled and said: "You must clear up these difficulties, Amelius: Porphyry doesn't understand our position." Amelius wrote a tract of considerable length, "In Answer to Porphyry's Objections"; I wrote a reply to the reply: Amelius replied to my reply; at my third attempt I came, though even so with difficulty, to grasp the doctrine: then only, I was converted, wrote a recantation and read it before the circle. From that time on I put faith in Plotinus' writings and sought to stir in the master himself the ambition of organising his doctrine and setting it down in more extended form. Amelius, too, under my prompting, was encouraged in composition.
19.
Longinus' estimate of Plotinus, formed largely upon indications I myself had given him in my letters, will be gathered from the following extract from one of his to me. He is asking me to leave Sicily and join him in Phoenicia, and to bring Plotinus' works with me. He says:
"And send them at your convenience or, better, bring them; for I can never cease urging you to give the road towards us the preference over any other. If there is no better reason and what intellectual gain can you anticipate from a visit to us?—at least there are old acquaintances and the mild climate which would do you good in the weak state of health you report. Whatever else you may be expecting, do not hope for anything new of my own, or even for the earlier works which you tell me you have lost; for there is a sad dearth of copyists here. I assure you it has taken me all this time to complete my set of Plotinus, and it was done only by calling off my scribe from all his routine work, and keeping him steadily to this one task.
