ABSTRACT
Proclus was born of patrician Lycian parents from the city of Xanthus. They wanted him to be educated in their city; thus, he was sent to Xanthus at a very early age. Later, he went to Alexandria to study rhetoric and Roman law in order to follow his father’s profession, law. He soon became interested in philosophy and abandoned the study of law, choosing instead to attend lectures on mathematics and the philosophy of Aristotle. About the age of twenty, he went to Athens and studied under the Athenian Plutarch and his successor, Syrianus, at the Academy, the Athenian school that traced its ancestry to Plato’s Academy. There, he continued his study of Aristotle and was introduced to Plato’s philosophy and to mystical theology, to which he became a devotee. Proclus was such an intense, diligent student, with extraordinary powers of comprehension and memory, that by the age of twenty he had read the whole of Aristotle’s De anima (335323 B.C.; On the Soul) and Plato’s Phaedo (388-366 B.C.), and by twenty-eight he had written several treatises as well as his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (360-347 B.C.).
