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For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned. He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis.
Neo-Platonism also, though it had enthusiasm and some sense of brotherhood, showed itself unable to produce a church. Plotinus, indeed, proposed to the Emperor Gallienus the establishment in Campania of a city of philosophers, a Platonopolis, in which the ideal life should be lived, but the proposal came to nothing.
He asked the Emperor Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow him to call it Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of him and his disciples, that they might there realise Plato's ideal republic.
Without imperial support, no Platonopolis could have been founded; and there was no time for any of those Illyrians to think of such things. even if they had had it in them to do so, as they had not: witness Aurelian's execution of Longinus. The time had gone by for that highest of all victories: as it might have gone by in our own day, but for events in Chicago, in February, 1898.
Yet our ideal, our "Civitas Dei," "Civitas Solis," need not remain unrealised: it may be not only seriously planned towards realisation, as was Platonopolis of old, but bravely founded, as has been done in cases without number, from the ancient world to modern communities, by no means wholly unsuccessful.
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