The Enneads of Plotinus

Plotinus · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 571 pages

The complete Enneads of Plotinus in the translation of Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page, published by Philip Lee Warner for the Medici Society in five volumes between 1917 and 1930 — MacKenna translating Enneads I to V and the first three tractates of Ennead VI being by B.S. Page, who also revised the remainder. At 571 pages this is the longest document in the section. The frontispiece is by Ivan Rabuzin, and a full table of contents lists every tractate with its page. The selections in “Plotinus on four approaches to enlightenment,” elsewhere in this section, are drawn from this same translation.

The volume opens with Porphyry on the life of Plotinus and the arrangement of his work, which explains how the fifty-four tractates came to be grouped into six sets of nine. The First Ennead then runs through the tractates on the animate and the man, on virtue, on dialectic — subtitled the upward way — on true happiness, on happiness and extension of time, on beauty, on the primal good and secondary forms of good, on the nature and source of evil, and on what is called the reasoned dismissal. The Second Ennead turns to the cosmos and the heavenly system, the heavenly circuit, whether the stars are causes, matter in its two kinds, potentiality and actuality, quality and form-idea, complete transfusion, and why distant objects appear small. The remaining four Enneads continue in the same arrangement, moving from the physical world through soul and intellect to the One. Because the whole is present and the contents page carries page numbers throughout, the file serves as the reference text behind the shorter Plotinus selections elsewhere in the section, and the beauty tractate quoted there can be read here in its place in the sequence.

Read the full text (PDF, 7.3 MB, 571 pages)