ABSTRACT
Neoplatonism marks the final phase of pagan philosophy. As has been seen, it is a philosophical current that adopted many ideas from Aristotelianism and Stoicism. But this came about on the premisses of Neoplatonism itself and without competition from the old philosophical ‘schools’—real live Stoics, Epicureans, or Sceptics were no longer to be found. Three features characterize the last phase of ancient philosophy: systematism, belief in authority, and a combination of philosophical and religious thoughts, which surely had antecedents in the first centuries of the Empire and even earlier, in Plato’s Academy, but which at this time emerges as a monolithic unity-of course not least because the competitor now no longer was another philosophical school but a religion, Christianity.
