Proklos'un Hayatı: Erdem Basamakları ve Platon'un Ardıllığı

Therefore, I shall not begin with the usual custom of writers, who treat the subject by distributing the discourse into chapters in order, but I think I will most correctly lay the very happiness of this blessed man as the foundation of my discourse. For I believe that he was the most fortunate of those men who have been celebrated for many centuries. I do not mean only with the happiness of the wise, although he possessed this most of all; nor that his bodily goods were most excellently constituted; nor again by reason of fortune, even though these things also befell him most of all, if they ever did any man. For he had an abundance of all those things which are called external goods. Rather, I speak of a perfect happiness, absolute in all its parts and constituted from both of these things. Therefore, we shall first begin with the more natural virtues, after having divided the virtues into natural, moral, and political, and also the higher ones, which concern themselves with purification and contemplation, and those by which one arrives at some likeness to the gods, and indeed those which are even superior to these, as being already placed beyond man.