ilosophers are best shewn in the treatise "De
mysteriis AEgyptiorum." Their hopes were strengthened when their disciple
Julian, a man enthusiastic and noble, but lacking in intellectual
originality, ascended the imperial throne, 361 to 363. This emperor's
romantic policy of restoration, as he himself must have seen, had,
however, no result, and his early death destroyed ever hope of
supplanting Christianity.

But the victory of the Church, in the age of Valentinian and Theodosius,
unquestionably purified Neoplatonism. The struggle for dominion had led
philosophers to grasp at and unite themselves with everything that was
hostile to Christianity. But now Neoplatonism was driven out of the
great arena of history. The Church and its dogmatic, which inherited its
estate, received along with the latter superstition, polytheism, magic,
myths and the apparatus of religious magic. The more firmly all this
established itself in the Church and succeeded there, though not without
finding resistance, the freer Neoplatonism becomes. It does not by any
means give up its religious attitude or its theory of knowledge, but it
applies itself with fresh zeal to scientific investigations and
especially to the study of the earlier philosophers. Though Plato
remains the divine philosopher, yet it may be noticed how, from about
400, the writings of Aristotle were increasingly read and prized.
Neoplatonic schools continue to flourish in the chief cities of the
empire up to the beginning of the fifth century, and in this period they
are at the same time the places where the theologians of the Church are
formed. The noble Hypatia, to whom Synesius, her enthusiastic disciple,
who was afterwards a bishop, raised a splendid monument, taught in
Alexandria. But from the beginning of the fifth century ecclesiastical
fanaticism ceased to tolerate heathenism. The murder of Hypatia put an
end to philosophy in Alexandria, though the Alexandrian school
maintained itself in a feeble form till the middle of the sixth century.
But in one city of the East, removed from the great highways of the
world, which had become a provincial city and possessed memories which
the Church of the fifth century felt itself too weak to destroy, viz.,
in Athens, a Neoplatonic school continued to flourish. There, among the
monuments of a past time, Hellenism found its last asylum. The school of
Athens returned to a more strict philosophic method and to learned
studies. But as it