For nearly two thousand years—from roughly 1500 BC until their violent suppression in the late fourth century AD—the most brilliant philosophers, statesmen, poets, and seekers of the classical world journeyed along the Sacred Way from Athens to the coastal town of Eleusis. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Plutarch, Cicero, and Roman emperors like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius all walked this stone path as humble supplicants.

Iamblichus of Chalcis was a philosopher of the late Roman world, born in Syria around the end of the third century. He studied and taught in the Neoplatonic tradition, which had been shaped by Plotinus and his students. Neoplatonism described reality as a series of levels that flowed out from a single source, the One, and it asked the human soul to climb back toward that source. Iamblichus took this vision further than many of his colleagues, and he defended a form of ritual practice that many thinkers found hard to accept. His ideas are best understood through a debate. In the decades before him, Porphyry, a student of Plotinus, had argued that the soul could draw near to the divine through pure thought, moral discipline and withdrawal from the world. Iamblichus responded that the human intellect alone was not enough. To reach the gods, he believed, the soul needed a deeper kind of action, which he called theurgy, a word that can be translated as god-work. The Debate with Porphyry...

The Sacred Decad: A triangular arrangement of ten points representing the organization of the universe and the harmony of the spheres.

The Assembly of the Sages: An iconic woodcut depicting the primordial debate where Greek philosophy met alchemical practice.

The Sea of Time and Space: William Blake's breathtaking visual commentary on Porphyry's Neoplatonic allegory.

Hypatia of Alexandria lived in one of the most important cities of the late Roman world, a place of libraries, schools and crowded harbors. Born around the middle of the fourth century, she was the daughter of Theon, a mathematician who worked on the texts of earlier Greek scholars. Hypatia became a teacher of mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, and she led a school in the Neoplatonic tradition, which drew on Plato, Plotinus and their followers. She is remembered as one of the first women in history to be known for scientific and philosophical work, and her death in 415 CE has become a symbol of the violence of her age. Because she wrote little that survives directly, much of what we know about her comes from later writers, letters and the memories of her students. This makes her story rich but also partly uncertain. Still, the outline of her life is clear enough to offer a meaningful lesson about reason, learning and courage. Geometry as a Ladder In the Neoplatonic view, the w...

The Ninnion Tablet (4th century BCE, National Museum of Athens) — one of the few ancient images believed to depict scenes from the Eleusinian initiatory rites, showing figures in procession bearing torches and sacred objects.

Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse (1896) — the young hero is surrounded by water nymphs who will draw him beneath the surface, a meeting between the human world and the living intelligence of wild nature.

For nearly four centuries (c. 700-300 BCE), the potters and painters of Athens produced a body of decorated ceramic art that constitutes one of the richest visual archives of Greek mythology and daily life that survives. Working in two successive techniques — black-figure (figures painted in black silhouette on red clay) and red-figure (figures left in red clay against a black background, allowing greater detail in musculature and expression) — they depicted the full range of the Greek mythological universe: the labors of Heracles, the Trojan War, the loves of the gods, the underworld, the Dionysiac mysteries, the athletic festivals. These were not luxury objects for aristocratic display alone; they were functional vessels — amphorae for wine and oil, kraters for mixing wine at symposia, cups for drinking — whose images accompanied the rituals of daily life, making the mythological universe present at every meal, every libation, every athletic competition.

She sat above a crack in the earth, on a three-legged bronze stool — the sacred tripod — in a small chamber deep within the innermost sanctuary of the temple. She had fasted. She had bathed in the waters of the Castalia spring. She had chewed laurel leaves. She breathed the vapors that rose from the fissure below her. Her eyes may have rolled back. She may have convulsed. When she spoke, a priest stood beside her, ready to write down what she said — because what she said, in a voice that was not quite her own, was the word of the god.