We carve great thinkers into marble and put their faces on money. Plotinus refused to let anyone paint his portrait and would not discuss his childhood, viewing the human body as a cheap copy of a higher reality. This episode follows the third-century philosopher from obscure origins in Roman Egypt through a disastrous military invasion to his rise as a reluctant author whose messy, typo-filled notes became the philosophical backbone of Western mysticism.

We cover his late start in philosophy at 28, his eleven years with the self-taught Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, and his decision to join Emperor Gordian III's campaign against Persia in search of Eastern wisdom, a venture that ended with the emperor dead and Plotinus stranded. We then follow him to Rome, where he taught senators, doctors, and women, pitched a city of philosophers called  ...