Proclus, one of the last great thinkers of Neoplatonic philosophy and of ancient Greek philosophical thought in general, was born in Constantinople on February 8, 412 AD.
A scion of a wealthy family from Lycia, he studied at the best educational centers of his time, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Athens. There, he came into contact with the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy, which captivated him definitively, and he became its director after the death of his teacher, Syrianus.
He died in Athens on April 17, 485 AD and was buried near Lycabettus. Living in an era of syncretistic chaos, he would synthesize the entire preceding Neoplatonic philosophical tradition into a unified and complex system, influenced by Pythagorean, Aristotelian, and Stoic elements.
In his system, he would amalgamate the one God, the intelligible and the intelligible substances, magic, and various demon-like beings, and in this form, he would hand it down to the scholastic Middle Ages. His work is a fundamental source for any scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy, as well as for Plato himself, whose original and extremely interesting interpretations he often proposes.
