ABSTRACT
The death of Alexander the Great in 323 b.c. marks roughly the end of an era. The philosophical tradition that had grown up in the free City States of Greece now assumed a new guise. During the next few centuries, the Greek spirit of enquiry pervaded the whole of the Mediterranean region, and ‘Hellenism’ became a kind of world culture, though people should bear in mind that the world in question consisted of the area covered by the Macedonian Empire and later the Roman Empire. The problem of how the world came into being had puzzled the Greek thinkers, who never really succeeded in answering it except in terms of myth. There was another people, however, which believed itself to be specially gifted with insight into the way the world had originated and how it was related to the Supreme Spirit. The thinkers of this group of ‘Neo-Platonists’, as they were called, were Platonists with a difference.
