The tomb of Proclus, in Athens, carried an epitaph that his biographer preserved. In it, the philosopher announces that he is Proclus, born in Lycia, and that Syrianus brought him up in Athens. He died in the year 485, after leading the Platonic school for nearly half a century. He is remembered chiefly for his dense books of metaphysics, but he was also something less expected for a thinker of his rank: a poet who wrote prayers to the gods. Seven of his hymns survive, and among them are verses that address the divine powers in general, as a single company. A Philosopher Who Prayed Proclus was born in Constantinople in 412 and grew up in Xanthus, in Lycia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. He studied in Alexandria, and then, around the age of twenty, he came to Athens, where Syrianus and Plutarch were teaching. He became head of the school around 437 and remained so until his death. His pupil and biographer Marinus describes a man of great devotion. Marinus claims that...

In Book 8 of the Iliad , Zeus challenges the other gods to a contest. Let them hang a golden chain from heaven, he says, and all of them pull at it together; they will not drag him down from the sky, but he could lift them all, with earth and sea, and tie the chain to the peak of Olympus. Centuries of readers took this as a plain boast. The Neoplatonists read it as a map of the universe: a golden chain, a seira , that links the highest principle to the lowest thing, so that whoever holds one link is, in a sense, holding the whole. The man who built the most elaborate system from this image also wrote hymns, and those hymns still survive. The Last Great Pagan Teacher Proclus was born in Constantinople around 412 CE and grew up in Lycia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor. He studied in Alexandria and then in Athens, where he became the head of the Platonic Academy, the school founded by Plato nearly nine centuries before. His student and biographer Marinus portrays him as a man o...