Augustine now encountered for the first time though the translations made by Marius Victorinus, a Platonic philosopher who had become a Christian. Platonism went back to Plato, who had lived at Athens in the fourth century BC,4 but it had been revived in a modified form about a century before Augustine was born by an Alexandrian called Plotinus (ca. 204–270) and his disciple Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305). Plotinus is credited with having turned what was essentially an academic philosophy into a kind