Platonopolis

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Platonist philosophers of Late Antiquity from Plotinus (third century) to the sixth-century schools in Athens and Alexandria neglected the political dimension of their Platonic heritage in their concentration on an otherworldly life. Dominic O''Meara presents a revelatory reappraisal of these thinkers arguing that their otherworldliness involved rather than excluded political ideas and he reconstructs for the first time a coherent political philosophy of Late Platonism.