Porphyry of Tyre

Plotinus's student, editor and biographer. He gathered his teacher's scattered essays and arranged them into six sets of nine — the Enneads, "nines" — an arrangement that is Porphyry's numerology and not Plotinus's plan. He also wrote a fifteen-book attack on Christianity that was burned so thoroughly it survives only in the quotations of the men refuting it.

Without him there is no Plotinus: the text the whole channel carries is the text he shaped. And the shape is his — a fact this pack keeps saying, because provenance is the house discipline.