a famous Platonic philosopher, was born at Tyre in 233, in the reign of Alexander Severus. He was the disciple of Longinus, and became the ornament of his school at Athens; from thence he went to Rome, and attended Plotinus, with whom he lived six years. After Plotinus's death he taught philosophy at Rome with great applause; and became well skilled in polite literature, geography, astronomy, and music. He lived till the end of the third century, and died in the reign of Diocletian. There are still extant his book on the Categories of Aristotle; a Treatise on Abstinence from Flesh; and several other pieces in Greek. He also composed a large treatise against the Christian religion, which is lost. That work was answered by Methodius bishop of Tyre, and also by Eusebius, Apollinaris, St Augustin, St Jerome, St Cyril, and Theodoret. The emperor Theodosius the Great caused Porphyrius's book to be burned in 338. Those of his works that are still extant were printed at Cambridge in 1655, 8vo, with a Latin version.

"Porphyrius (says Dr Enfield) was, it must be owned, a writer of deep erudition; and had his judgment and integrity been equal to his learning, he would have deserved a distinguished place among the ancients. But neither the splendour of his diction, nor the variety of his reading, can atone for the credulity or the dishonesty which filled the narrative part of his works with so many extravagant tales, or interest the judicious reader in the abstruse subtleties and mystical flights of his philosophical writings."